Marketing Influence & Thought Leadership

Innovating the Customer & Citizen Experience

Innovation is THE buzz word spinning out of control. Even Obama talked about how we must all innovate. REALLY! In this blog I provide three short stories of innovation with some valuable insights into the innovation process. In my experience as someone who has actually innovated, vs. those who have just studied it and wrote then wrote about it, the innovation equation almost always boils down to people, process and technology. There are many authors and self proclaimed innovators out there that study innovation and sometimes the process that leads up to it. However, there is nothing like living the innovation experience as I have now in two careers, marine science and information technology. The challenge of innovation is that there really is no equation or recipe for it beyond those three parameters.

As an innovative marine scientist at Woods Hole we leveraged the MOCNESS system, (pictured above) which enabled us to study the stratification of plankton populations in our oceans, (I won’t bore you spelling out the acronym.) We were the first scientists to walk off a ship with all our data on floppy drives. And when it came time to really understanding the behavior of juvenile cod and haddock we used remotely operated vehicles and small submersibles to see them in real time. We selected the best people, looked at process, and then leveraged the technology that was available, but most importantly there was trust amongst all which lead to unabridged collaboration. In the 1980s collaboration in a scientific community was unheard of but we had the right people and only one of us had a PHD.

In looking back at our team we had the right chemistry and cast of characters:

• R Gregory Lough the PHD of oceanography with intense focus.
• Dave Potter the fisheries biologist with unending energy.
• Hal Merry the retired Air force Pilot turned electronic technician.
• George Bolz the likeable and intense fisheries biologist.
• Peter Auditore the invertebrate zoologist that identifies everything.
• Phil LeBlanc the ichthyologist with a Napoleonic complex.

 In my blog Innovating the Customer Experience , I discussed different types of Innovation, business model, product, services, organizational, and why creating a culture of collaboration which leads to innovation is king, http://thesocialcustomer.com/peterauditore1/38046/innovating-customer-experience. What was amusing about this blog was a comment that questioned how I could use innovating as a verb. Well, guess what that is just me. Last fall Dr. Henry Chesbrough of Berkeley’s Center for Open Innovation, and I embarked on an innovation research journey that profiled companies in two industries and one governmental organization that innovated their business processes.

• Insurance: AAA Michigan
• Automotive: Colmobil Israel
• Government: City of Birmingham, United Kingdom

Rather than entering into long elaborative discussions about how these organizations innovated, I will provide short focused seminal insights from the interviews that Dr. Chesbrough conducted. So let’s start with AAA and end with GOV who in my view really needs innovation in nearly every way to serve us citizens.

AAA of Michigan Innovation: Customer Experience Management

The objective of AAA’s Claims Core Redesign Process was to reduce the increased cost per claim due to inefficient processes, in order to improve the efficiency of their Claim Organization and the service to our members and improve employee morale in the claims processing unit. An innovator was brought in to evaluate and make changes to the claims processes.

Business Process Environment

• Organization and processes were fragmented with 3 different claims systems, plus 4 or 5 ancillary systems, this made it difficult to identify areas of inefficiencies that needed to be addressed.
• Call times were 15 minutes on average or longer.
• This translated to increased cost per claim because it took longer to resolve claims.
• Customer satisfaction needed improvement.
• Employee morale was the lowest of the whole organization.

Net/Net

The innovator realized that the problem was not simply one of technology, but rather one that required addressing people, processes and technology; so the project moved from technology only, to an initiative that encompassed people, process and technology.  They created cross-functional teams to address the people, processes and technology. 

People Innovation:

AAA senior leaders understood that this was a complex initiative, and realized there are moments where you need to balance the right amount of communication as you run into challenges that inevitably occur during development. Initially they had weekly steering committee meetings and that moved to bi-weekly, and finally monthly.  As the project rolled out, perceptible improvements in employee satisfaction emerged.  Now they are “not a bad place to work” and there are improvements in job turnover and retirements as well.  There are still parts of the company using the old processes, and when those adjustors see other adjustors using the new system, they get envious.  “When can I get on the new system?”

Process Innovation: One of the insights that emerged was the existence of 6-7 layers between managers and the claims adjusters, in order to improve our processes; they took out layers of management, and segmented by product line. 

Technology Innovation: Their goal from the beginning was to integrate their claim application with policy management and existing financial systems, along with other core applications in the company.  AAA needed to align cost, expense, and customer service through the same data, rather than requiring different views of the data through different applications.  The goal was to be able to use the claims record as the core hub of the process, and view all of their processes through a single shared file and they did this by standardizing on a single vendor.

Colmobil of Israel Innovation:  Customer Experience Management

Colmobil imports some of the leading automotive brands in Israel, Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, and Mitsubishi, traditionally each brand was a separate company, with its own unique business processes and IT requirements.  Today the customer has become more and more important, and they could no longer afford to be so product centric.  The same customer might appear to them in three different ways across three brands.  They might be a fleet manager, responsible for a dozen or more Mercedes trucks, they might drive a Mitsubishi SUV, and/or, buy a Hyundai for a relative.  Their systems could not track this. 

Business Process Environment

• They shared IT resources, but had three flavors of IT, one for each brand and very product centric. 
• Every brand had a long product cycle, from the initial placement of the order through to delivery, maintenance and repairs, recalls, and so on post-sale. 
• The information travelled with the vehicle and the customer data they had was subordinated to the vehicle data, and the VIN was the centerpiece of each data record in the system. 
• They had no way to modify these systems and solve this due to their deep product centricity.

Net/Net

People and Process Innovation: The world is becoming customer centric and they needed to change their culture, processes and how they would work to address this.  If they tried to do it in stages, they would get lots of resistance from employees.  So in the end they did it in 20 months, and after 2-3 months of breaking it in, they were back in business and there was only a marginal impact on business during this transition.  Now they’re in the second phase and plan to make the system more intelligent. This also gave them confidence to reorganize the company to be market focused. 

Technology Innovation: They perceived only two options, either implement a CRM system on top of the product legacy system, and train our people to work on two systems simultaneously; or reinvent everything to free themselves from the constraints of the legacy systems.  This way the employee would only have to work with one system, and the CRM would generate all the transactions.  All the ERP would be done under the hood, so to speak.

In summary, they now have a passenger vehicle division, a premium vehicle division, and a buses and trucks division. When the customer comes to them now, they have a full view of him/her. In summary, they had 25% more vehicle sales this past year with no increase in headcount.  Their stock keeping in spare parts is much improved, and their data is more accurate now as well, and most importantly, the owners are very happy.

City of Birmingham United Kingdom Innovation: Citizen Experience Management

The City of Birmingham has a “corporate director of business change” and they are responsible a wide variety of business services that spans everything from refuse collection and includes child social care that serves three different groups: disabled children, antisocial behavior in children, and children suffering child abuse.  They have one of the most unique business change process methodologies I have ever seen in GOV:

• Visioning
• Design
• Build
• Testing
• Implementation and realization of benefits from the business model change.

 

 

Net/Net

People & Process Innovation: One of their business model changes was to move from a reactive model to a more proactive model, where they could utilize analytics to identify at-risk children and households.  This has allowed child services to make interventions long before the behavior occurred, such as providing coaching on parenting skills to the parents.  They still need to react when problems arise, but they are trying to shift to a prevention focus and are running a series of concurrent pilot programs in schools to test this, and to compare which interventions are most effective in reducing later incidence of anti-social behavior or child abuse. The people management changes were rolled out one directorate at a time.  They started with the corporate directorate, where there was strong support for the change.  Having brought that off, they rolled it out to other directorates

Technology Innovation: They started a program to transform their business models in 2006, covering about 2/3 of their business functions and delivered through 9 different work streams.  These changes were enabled by IT and three of the core change programs depended heavily upon ERP.  The financial back office change was a big bang approach, with no pilot testing and it delivered the goods by reducing headcount in the back office finance functions by 28% and by performing financial processes accurately and efficiently. 

My Net/Net

People, process and technology are consistent in all these innovation stories along with buy-in and support from senior management and strong governance processes. Change management is often overlooked in many attempts to innovate, however, it was an important parameter in these innovation successes. And for the most part customer experience management is one of the primary objectives of each innovation initiative. Until next time I wish you great selling and marketing in the millennium. 

 

Innovating the Customer Experience

Innovation is the buzz word of the millennium. Everyone, every company and now even governments are trying to innovate. Why? Competition in many industries is global and many companies see innovation of products, services (especially customer service) and business models as the path to maintaining competitive advantage, and creating sustainable profitable growth. The age of the Internet and now Web 2.0 has disrupted government and forced a new era of transparency that has never been seen before. Governments are now in a situation where citizens are now customers demanding enhanced services.

Many companies think they can simply “silo bust” and force feed a collaborative culture and bam they get innovation.  It doesn’t happen that way. Technology can be a key enabling platform especially for innovating the customer experience, but it is nothing without the innovators.  Everyone is not an innovator, just like everyone is not an entrepreneur, but the two share similar characteristics. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word innovation harkens back to Hartz Darm 1297: Innovation= the action of innovating; the introduction of novelties; the alteration of what is established by the introduction of new elements or forms. This is quite an eloquent definition and it somewhat fits modern day organizational process.  When I think about innovation today I see four pillars, all of which in some way are related to the innovation of customer service.

The Four Pillars of Innovation

• Product innovation
• Business model innovation
• Services model innovation
• Organizational innovation

Building a culture of collaboration isn’t the instant answer to creating innovation or innovating your customer’s experience. However, leveraging the newest collaborative applications can help find your innovators and ultimately lead to innovation. The biggest challenge facing organizations today are finding the innovators in their organizations and/or, recruiting innovators. Creating, managing and enabling a culture of innovation is a difficult task and as I always say, “you can’t make huskies run like greyhounds.” I discussed the cultural aspects of innovation in my blog the Silicon Valley Way and how culture has played a key role in the rise of the valley.  http://myventurepad.com/peterauditore1/54784/silicon-valley-way

Who are the Innovators?

Three years ago I became an active member of the Berkeley Innovation Forum, (BIF) which includes a selected group of innovators along with those companies that are trying to innovate. BIF is the genius of Dr. Henry Chesbrough, Professor and Executive Director of the Center for Open Innovation, who has brought together a “who’s who” of innovation from many global corporations. Dr. Chesbrough has also written a series of books on innovation which I would highly recommend, including:

• Open Innovation, HBS 2006
• Open Business Models, HBS 2006
• Open Services Innovation, Jossey Bass 2011

My colleagues and I at SAP have attended the meetings and participated in three innovation challenges. Interestingly all of which have been directly related to innovating products, services and business models:

• Best Buy Challenge: Selling and Marketing of Electric bikes.
• Nike Challenge: Selling Biometric clothing to a target market.
• SAP Challenge: Acquiring a billion users. 

Innovators are a rare breed and like entrepreneurs they are major risk takers and are not afraid to fail. Sometimes an innovator is an entrepreneur. Many come from cultures of innovation like Silicon Valley or were raised by innovative parents or family members.  They think differently and when they were kids they got the birthday card that said, “You march to the beat of a different drummer.” There are innovators in your company, and/ or organization, the way to finding them is by empowering them. Innovation is also driven from the ecosystem surrounding the organization including its partners, but this also includes customers.

At the BIF meeting this spring, Scott Cook CEO of Intuit presented their approach to finding the innovators and executing what he called “small experiments” that were product and/or services model innovations.  This was a very new and unique approach to finding ideas and innovators in Intuit and it was done through an IT platform developed by a new employee that came into the company and said Intuit’s knowledge management sucked. They empowered the employee and built a new “Facebook like” collaborative knowledge management platform for sharing ideas in hopes of facilitating innovation. This has enabled Intuit to find the innovators and empower them, the old knowledge management platform was seldom used by employees as are most because there was nothing in it for the employee. SAP has recently announced that it will be bundling its collaborative platform named Streamworks into its business portfolio, making it easier for its customers to find innovators and share knowledge across CRM and ERP systems.  

Innovating Customer Service

During the late 1980s CRM emerged and one of the first proactive steps in customer service was the customer satisfaction survey. There was even a company named CustomerSat in the valley that I worked with. Customer satisfaction information can be easily acquired now by sniffing the digital exhaust of the social customer. In the case of social customers that don’t post reviews it is not that easy, but you can bet that they are reading online reviews even if they aren’t posting them.

In my view innovating customer service begins with understanding the complete end to end customer experience. This is not easy and many companies in retail services like Starbucks for example, have gone to third parties to hire “secret shoppers” who chronicle their experiences. Today’s customer experience doesn’t begin at your website; it begins in the social media ecosystem. I walked into an AT&T store last week to add another IPhone to my account and as soon as I walked in the door I expected poor service. It was not, the service was excellent but why? The representative was armed with all the information about me that made the visit PERFECT and his understanding of AT&T products and services was outstanding. Here is where the training comes in and we all know about the employee turnover rates in retail.

Knowing the customer is king and when you look at competitive differentiation today for many companies it’s all about the customer experience. In order to wow them you must know them. This means understanding the discipline of business intelligence and leveraging it to harvest the rich data sets that are easily accessed from social media. Innovating the customer experience requires more than CRM systems and information technology, and/or collaboration between employees that probably aren’t innovators. You must find your innovators, they may be your customers and/or your partners. Intuit’s example is a great one; I have posted a series of blog on BIF on this site and www.myventurepad.com. One thing I have learned about innovation in scientific and technology careers and at BIF, is that it is not a defined process with a cookie cutter menu. And this is what many companies try to implement. Until next time I wish you great selling and marketing in the millennium.

 

 

 

 

The Social Media Data Tsunami

The data tsunami has arrived. According to recent research from the MIT Center for Digital Research, digital Information is doubling every 1.2 years and will exceed 1000 Exabytes in the next year. And the size of the largest data warehouses is tripling every two years. There is so much data now related to our “own lives” that it is overwhelming and almost unmanageable. This is especially true for the social customers who are becoming more powerful every day through the new word of mouth marketing platform called the social web.

Let’s take a short walk down data memory lane. Before the Internet we had tons of data collected and managed first on punch cards, large hard drives, flat file data bases and then came one of the most powerful technological innovations in the form of the relational data base. This was quickly followed by the advent of the business intelligence market and data warehousing platforms which enabled CRM. 

The MIT researchers also point out that an inflection point in information technology use began right around 1995 when the Internet took hold. At that point purchasing of industrial transportation and other business equipment leveled off as information technology purchasing skyrocketed with business process reengineering that enabled the digitization of business processes. In 1993 Michael Hammer and James Champy’s book, Reengineering the Corporation delivered the thought leadership and acted as a catalyst in those smart companies and organizations that understood IT is a competitive advantage.

Pre-Internet Data

• Flat file and RDBMS
• OLTP transaction
• Business process transaction
• Email messages
• RFID
• Real-time machinery diagnostics/engines/equipment
• Bar code scanner data
• Stock market transactions

Enter the Internet, a massive disrupter that changed the way we do everything. Corporate web sites flew up with reckless abandon in hopes of innovating business models and creating more sustainable profitable growth. It was all about clickstream data, site visits, stickiness, and the data for the most part was rudimentary in nature, but the big search engines knew more about everyone and everything. There was even a search engine called Alta Vista, but they became road kill very quickly because of geographical cultural issues. More importantly, however, there was one company that thought that it could quickly build its own Internet on its own standards and we know who that is now. As Socrates once said “the very thing that makes you great will be your undoing.” Amazon was the first to begin sniffing the digital exhaust and began to harvest the gold in ways that none had visioned with one click shopping and predictive analytics.

Internet 1.0 Data

• Clickstream/Page views/Web transactions
• Web links
• Alta Vista/Google/Yahoo Searches
• Wikipedia updates

Now a tsunami of social media data is upon us. During my evolution to Social predator I left such a large plume of digital exhaust to be honest I couldn’t believe it. Most of it wasn’t through Twitter, although our most recent SNCR research clearly shows it as an Amazon of social media. What surprised me was what I wrote about in the Crescendo effect, and in the Ecosystem of Influence blogs, was that hundreds of people read my reviews of restaurants and hotel stays. Now we have even more powerful data to work with, like the customers or a potential customer’s location in addition to preferences likes and dislikes about food and environments. This leads us further down the experience economy path where brand experience reins king.

Social Customer & Web 2.0 Data

• Mobile phone/GPS/Location data
• Blog references
• Facebook updates
• Twitter feeds
• LinkedIn Updates
• Yelp Reviews & TripAdvisor reviews

Net/Net

In the New Symbiosis of Professional Networks research respondents told us that LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook where the top professional social networks. What we have going on here is a dramatic sea change in human collaboration and interrelationships that is already digitized and available for harvesting. Other findings I thought worth mentioning are:

• A strong 60% of the population used social networking to increase the own professional network
• And 60% of those surveyed were using it to monitor brand.
• Nearly 50% of the respondents indicated that they also participated in specialized or industry specific social networks.
• Apple is the portal to social behavior as 67% of respondents used an Apple mobile device to access a social network. Apple IPhone apps for social networking rose from 180 in 2009 to 736 in 2010.

So what does this all mean? It means that those “Amazon like” companies that understand the basics of analytics and data harvesting can gain a massive competitive advantage over those in their industries that do not go “web farming.” This is an incredible bonanza for data miners who can essentially know everything about us and now where we are. In 1999 I ran across a book entitled Web Farming for the Data Warehouse by Richard Hackthorn, that provides a cook book for web farming the information resources of the web, a great book way ahead of its time.

The Game Changer

In Memory data management is one of the newest technology innovations that portends to change the way we collect, manage and make decisions on data. Along with predictive analytics and other business intelligence tools, this brings a new way of looking at data and will enable “real time data mining,” even of OLTP data bases. This is something that many companies asked for in numerous surveys that I conducted during the 1999-2000 period. The good news is that now memory is cheap. In the simplest of terms, In Memory computing enables you replicate and mirror data sets from any data base in memory on a separate hardware device or within the BI system and/or platform. That means that I can look at data as its collected in real time and watch it trend enabling “real time business decision making.” These technologies are not out of the reach of small and midsized businesses that will leverage the cloud.

 

 

The disciplines of data warehousing and analytics are now taking on special meaning in our society from predicting where and when parolees recommit crimes, to enriching our customer experience at the theme park. Companies that harvest the rich web of social media will undoubtedly gain competitive advantage in their industries and governments can also serve their citizens with enhanced services. Until next time I wish you great selling and marketing in the millennium.  

 

Social Media is Changing SMB Marketing + Hurricanes & Marine Micro Fauna

During the course of this year’s AMI-Partners Social Media Marketing awards presentation on November 11^th in NYC, MyVenturePad received the best of class award in social media marketing demand generation. I want to thank the Social Media Today staff and all the bloggers and members of MVP for their continuing participation in this growing community focused on the issues facing small business. Nearly all the major technology vendors, AT&T, Dell, HP, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Intuit, Oracle and Avaya received awards for excellence in social media marketing to SMBs globally. SMBs are an increasingly important opportunity for technology vendors as there are now an estimated 80-100 million small and medium businesses worldwide. http://www.ami-partners.com/index.php?target=news&mode=details&news_id=157#157

It is always great to receive awards but I thought the data AMI presented about social media in the SMB world would be of significant interest to the MVP community. AMI-Partners presented an excellent overview of how SMBs are shifting to electronic media & information sources driven by relevancy, trust, and interactivity. This is really no surprise, although there are a lot of old schoolers out there that are ignoring the opportunity to get closer to their customers. Let’s take a big picture look at their findings from a purely business perspective first, as a “data dog” I love research, reading the data, and found their data points to be insightful.

Key business challenges facing SMBs globally are:

• Decreased Revenue
• Canceled Orders
• Restricted Cash Flow
• Slower Payment
• Tight Credit

Nothing surprising here, but what was really interesting about their findings was that only 5% of those SMBs surveyed were aware of any stimulus packages and were benefiting from it. Nearly 50% were unaware of any stimulus money available for them. So much for the stimulus packages, were did the money go?

Globally there was a slight decrease in concern about economic conditions, which ranged from 70% in North American and close to 50-55% for the LATAM, EMEA and APAC, this is again very insightful.

SMBs are Shifting their IT Decision Making

Information technology can and is delivering competitive advantage in all business and new media is gaining significant ground on traditional media when it comes to the purchasing decision making for IT products.

• Traditional Print and Media (decreased significantly in small businesses).
• Internet sites (increased overall globally).
• Search Engines (increased overall globally).
• Social Networks (significant increase overall globally).
• Referrals VARs IT consultants (decreased significantly globally).
• Trade Associations & Industry Conferences (decreased significantly globally).

AMI’s findings show that an estimated 4.8 million SMBs in the U.S. and (76%) use some form of social media for business use. This represents $180 billion in information technology spend and 48% used some form of social media in the purchase decision making process.

Two other important points:

• Nearly $23 billion of information technology sending was impacted by Social Media in 2010
• AMI projects that social media will impact $53 billion in U.S. SMB ICT spending by 2013

Vital Statistics:

• Data collected during Q1 2010
• Total sample size N=378, from a sampling pool of 11,000 US SMBs.  The sample was representative of all employee size bands, verticals and geography.
• Employee size bands:  1-4, 5-9, 10-19, 20-49, 50-99, 100-249, 250-499, 500-999
• Verticals: Agri/Min/Utils/Trans/Cnst/Bldg (AMTUC), FIRE/Finance/Real Estate (FIRE), Manufacturing, Professional Business Services, Retail,  Wholesale, Other Services

 

 Net/Net

Social media is accelerating the purchase decision making of SMBs and enabling them to purchase more technology faster. This is something that early SNCR research identified last year in The New Symbiosis of Professional Networks study which can be found on this site http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/143500. The growing level of trust in social media peer groups is now certainly a factor in many B2B business arenas and definitely a major factor in purchase decision making in anything B2C.

The Personality of Fish: Hurricanes and Marine Micro Fauna

Now that hurricane season is nearly over I think it is safe to talk about them. What always blows my mind about Atlantic hurricanes is that many of them begin their evolution as warm air and dust that blows off the Sahara desert into the Atlantic Ocean. Research shows that dust collected during hurricanes in Barbados originated from Africa and the Alps. These mini storm systems then follow the traditional track of the westerly’s (the trade winds the early explorers used) into the Caribbean where they begin to intensify into tropical storms and hurricanes. In many cases they find the Gulf Stream and follow it up the Eastern Seaboard of the United States and approach Cape Hatteras, once known as the graveyard of the Atlantic.

 I have spent many days at sea and the day I awakened to find myself near the Cape was one I will never forget. I didn’t know exactly where we were, but I distinctly remember the smell of fear in the air; there was something different about this place and its energy. I thought as if I could smell death. Thanks to modern meteorology Cape Hatteras is no longer the graveyard it once was.

Hurricanes have a seminal role in the distribution of plants and animals, primarily because of their tremendous strength, long track duration and course. Marine micro fauna in the form of plankton like Foraminfera, Ostracods and other high order microorganisms are transported great distances by hurricanes. In 1967, the ship Vidal encountered rain with fresh water diatomites in the middle of the Atlantic. Birds, butterflies and insects often find refuge in the eye of a hurricane and are transported great distances. In 1917 a paper by Hurd, he details the transportation of insects, in this case locusts over 2000 KM from the African coast. We still have a lot of work to do when it comes to understanding our atmosphere-ocean interface and in this case the distribution of organisms like marine micro fauna. Who knew that hurricane rain would be a good garden fertilizer? I hope you have enjoyed this year’s personality of fish sections and I wish you great marketing and selling in the millennium.  

 

 

 

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Facebook in the Experience Economy & Cephalopods Pelagic Raptors of the Deep

Joseph Pine and James Gilmore’s book, The Experience Economy 1999, was a harbinger of the end of the services economy, which according to these authors peaked some years ago. As observers of the rapidness of commoditization in nearly all markets and business they were vaticinators of the experience economy we are now realizing in social media. The social media tsunami is fueling the experience economy as people, groups, customers, partners, companies, and governments and many other organizations are interacting and forming interrelationships via the social media peer groups in new and unforeseen Web 2.0 ways.

The societal and anthropological aspects of social media peer groups are just now beginning to be understood and the ramifications of these interrelationships are just being felt. These new platforms are enabling communications that leads to interrelationships between people, and groups that has never been seen before. They now enable us to create, build, maintain and reestablish previous relationships from other points and times in our lives, and are enabling new relationships with our government, NGOs, and the companies we consume products and services from.

Enter the social media landscape: craigslist, facebook, youtube, myspace, twitter, flickr, photobucket, linkedin, digg, ning, yelp, tagged, squidoo, scribd, stumbleupon, hi5, bebo, reddit, myyearbook, technorati, caboodle, Friendster, flixster, xanga, epinions, plaxo, mybloglog, yuku, metafilter, blackplanet, care2, getsatisfaction, friendfeed, clipmarks, cafemon, newwvine, omgili, gigya, ballhipe, current, revver, ping, tribe, magnify, digo, dzone, xing, faves, tweetdeck, ecademy, twine.

(The Fifty Top Social Media Sites from Website Magazine’s Feb 2010 issue, I added craiglist)

The Good, the Bad, the I don’t care and now the Ugly

In the world of Sociobiology our father E. O. Wilson taught us about societies and behavior previously unknown to man, the hierarchy of termites, ants and other insects that have one common trait, altruism. Each member of the community communicates, interacts, behaves and performs a function that is predetermined by the community hierarchy and all are in the best interest of the community, harvesting, defending territory, nurturing eggs and gardens within. Humans don’t act like this and when presented with a new community like social media they will act in many ways that are often predictable and sometimes nefarious. What we don’t know about Facebook and many of the other sites is how humans are really acting and what the good, the bad, the I don’t care and the ugly experiences are.

The Good

Two years ago I found my long lost cousin in Australia on Facebook, wow we Skype nearly every week now. This is a good interrelationship. I have found enormous professional value in being a member of LinkedIn and my network has expanded to several hundred colleagues and professional connections. My Facebook community of friends and colleagues is mixed with both, but I would prefer that it be only my friends and that is where the line blurs. I know that HR people can profile me now on Facebook and even decide whether I am culturally fit for a potential job, this is good and bad. I could be culturally unfit just because I am too old or because of their perception of my sexual preference. This is good and bad. Facebook in particular has now become a great tool for social media marketing for small and large businesses alike in addition to non profits who want to get closer to their customers.

The Bad

The beginning of the bad is when relatives that did nothing for you suddenly appear and want to be your friend. They are the relatives that you wanted to forget, but they are still there back at you as if nothing really happened. It’s like that Rodney Dangerfield joke, “would you be friends with your relatives if you weren’t related to them?” It can get really worse if you are stalked by a former girl friend or boy friend and Facebook has many stalkers, I even had one person do what they thought was a cute video of me during the last holiday season. There is a tremendous amount of information out there on all us and it is growing every day, so be careful when you share information about traveling and other personal issues. Remember that according to statistics a high percentage of identity theft comes from your own relatives that are jealous of you. There are also many stalkers that use Facebook’s IM to get people’s attention to start a conversation; they may come from your friends networks. For example some men will IM every women they know to be single a happy mother’s day wish even if they don’t know if they are mothers or not. This just happened to one of my friends. 

I don’t care!

Then a series of old friends from high school came back into the picture, and I connected with them, but have found their world to be one that I don’t live in anymore. They talk about the little insular and provincial New England town that I was raised in and invite me to groups and events important to that town. These events aren’t important to me, I don’t live there and to be quite honest I really don’t care about them. Nor do I want to enter into relationships with people that I really have nothing to share with anymore. I am not trying to be snotty or uppity but I really don’t care about their home town lives. I don’t live there.

The Ugly

The ugly stories keep pouring in and with hundreds of millions of people on Facebook and within other social media peer groups, I bet there are hundreds if not thousands of stories like the following happening all the time. Last weekend I had lunch with a friend that hates Facebook. He claims it has wrecked his brother’s and his best friend’s marriages. In the case of his brother, his wife left a marriage of 23 years and a 14 year old daughter to be with another woman. Unfortunately, she forgot to de-friend my friend and is flaunting her new life on Facebook for all to see while abandoning her husband and daughter.

In the case of his best friend his wife also left because she found her high school sweetheart on Facebook and recently just up and left another 20 year marriage with two children to be with him. I heard the same story from my hairdresser on Monday of last week about how her sister just up and left her family. It would be easy to dismiss these situations based on unhappy marriages and the times of uncertainty that we live in today because of our broken government and financial system, but I don’t think so. Facebook and the other SMPGs are enabling communications that would have never happened before. What do you think? How many stories like this have you heard?

The Personality of Cuttlefish

Cuttlefish (Sepia sp.) are marine invertebrates and are actually are mollusks in a class called Cephalopoda which is highly adapted for swimming. They are the fastest swimmers of all marine invertebrates and employ a highly evolved jet propulsion system using water. Some species can actually propel themselves out of the water and are known as flying squids. There are only around 650 species in the class which includes squid, octopods, and nautili, the largest are the giant squid. Giant squids inhabit depths along the continental shelf to depths of 600 meters and the most famous of them the Humboldt squid range in large schools up and down the Pacific coast.

 

All cephalopods are kings of camouflage and can change their color instantly and in some cases their skin texture to match their immediate surroundings to hide from predators or lie in wait for prey.  Cuttlefish are slower swimmers than streamlined squid and leverage their small shell for bouncy along with fluid and the gas nitrogen. Light is a major factor for Cuttlefish and it regulates its bouncy the more light the less buoyant. They spend the day burrowed into the bottom and at night they become active gaining more buoyancy to swim up into the water column to hunt. Cuttlefish and squids are what is called highly adapted for raptorial feeding and carnivorous diet, they have ten arms arranged in two arrays of five around the head. Eight are short and heavy while the other two are twice as long and are called tentacles used for seizing prey.

Some Cuttlefish live at depths of more than 1200 meters and others live in shallow tide pools in our warmer oceans. These animals have the highest degree of nervous system development of all marine invertebrates which enable their mobility and carnivorous nature. They are diecous (meaning there are males and females) and they engage in copulation with normally the male seizing the female head on. Cuttlefish can display complex color changes which are thought to be directly related to behavior and most species change color when alarmed. I hope you have enjoyed this blog post and good luck selling and marketing in the millennium. And how will your behavior change the next time you log onto Facebook, will you turn a different color?

Why you need to know your Social Customers: Because they control your brand!

I am a Starwood, Marriot, Hilton member but it gets me almost nothing to be honest, I have been a United Mileage plus member twenty years, and I even have a frequent parking account. But what really frustrates me about a lot of these programs is that they don’t know who I am and many organizations are not leveraging them for competitive advantage. When I arrive at hotels they never upgrade me, and for the most part I never hear from these programs anymore. I remember a time when we got monthly statements about our activity and then they were moved to quarterly and then disappeared completely! Why because they forgot about us, their most loyal customers.

I expect more for my loyalty, don’t you? What many companies don’t understand is that they no longer control their brand, the social customer does. All of us should become social customers; this will enable us to drive up the overall quality of products and services in many companies and industries globally. Most importantly companies need to know who their social customers are; here is a real world example of how social customers are impacting business today. I am a social customer and now hundreds of people are reading my Trip Advisor hotel reviews. Here is my most recent post read by 100 people in less than a week, and so far the poor reaction to my comments about this hotel from its management.

Sheraton NYC Towers Trip Advisor Review

This was my second stay at this hotel in less than a month and I have to say it needs a major overhaul, all the way from the rooms down to the bell desk and into the club lounge. What was most scary about this place was the overall lack of security especially at 1-2am when no security people were at the elevator entry areas. I did really like the club level and the breakfast is fun and coffee nice along with the overall environment. The bar at the club was missing the martini stirrer and didn't have absolute vodka, a woman next to said “it’s always like that here.”

But let’s start at the beginning, we arrive late its 85 degrees and humid as we enter our stuffy room on the floor twenty and the air conditioner doesn't work. I call down to the desk and they say they will send up maintenance, thirty minutes passes no one arrives. We pack up our stuff and head down to the front desk this time pissed off. We ask for another room and I complain about the room assignment, the front desk attendant says "what do you expect me to check out every room to see if the air conditioner works?" I ask for a manager and he is even ruder, and guess what? I am a ten year Starwood member and our company recommends this hotel, I remind him of that, but he doesn’t care. They assign me a room above the club level, make sense? I don't think so, the next day I ask for the day manager, Zoe Cohen and she is nice and gives me 12,000 Starwood points. 

Two days later it is raining and we attempt to go out for dinner, the cab line is long and the bell captain is nowhere to be found, so I jump the line and get my own cab. The next morning we leave at 5:45 am and guess what? There is no bell person to help with anything? What is up with this? Overall a great location and it is unfortunate that all our European visitors are treated to the same level of poor service. I noticed many Italians during my two visits. The good news is our maid service was very good, but I don't think I will stay here again, because as a Starwood member I expected my room to be ready at 1AM. On my previous visit my colleague’s room wasn't ready either and we checked at 6:30PM.

Sheraton’s Response to my TripAdvisor Review

Dear Paul,

Thank you for taking the time to provide the feedback and recap of your visit here in NYC.
The content, although some of it painful is critical to our performance and garnering guest loyalty. I would like to discuss your visit in more detail if you have the time. During this conversation I will also update you on our direction for renovations that are coming soon.

We look forward to hearing back from you on how to connect.
Sincerely
Mark Sanders

Net/Net

 

Identifying and managing your social customers is paramount in the social media landscape of today and it can be a clear differentiator in many industries, in this case especially hotels as they are very vulnerable. I think it is great that Sheraton at least corresponded with me but the same lack of sincerity and thoroughness about their product and services was reflected in their response.  First of all they got my name wrong, they did not address one of my issues and a security lapse in NYC is serious. They did not recognize me as a Starwood member or even say we are making sure that the club bar is stocked an appropriately appointed with martini stirrers. I pulled the latest statistics off TripAdvisor and although the site says that 67% of travelers recommend this hotel, the number is actually closer to 57%.

The general manager was nice enough to offer the opportunity to talk with me, but to be honest; I am not too interested in communicating with you if you can’t even get my name correct. The power of social media today is the power of the community, not the power of one. If I was the manager of a large iconic hotel in the most visited city in the America I would be shocked that only 2/3^rd s of the visitors to my hotel could recommend it. TripAdisor, Yelp and many others are now the voice of the people and their voice travels globally at Internet speed. As a business, know these communities and leverage your customers loyalty in new and exciting ways that can keep them loyal and provide you with the opportunity to find new loyal customers that can enhance your brand.

 

Sheraton NYC Towers Reviews All (1,464)

67% of travelers recommend this hotel

 

·         Excellent                                             331

·         Very good                                            484

·         Average                                               275

·         Poor                                                     222

·         Terrible                                               138

 

 

 

British Petroleum Begins a New Era of Responsibility for NGOs

We all need and consume oil, and the myriad of products spawned from its ecosystem. We all share in the risk of exploiting it, some more directly than others. And then there are those neighborhoods (next to the refineries) that absorb more risk than others. And then there are the oil companies that take on the risk of exploitation, but in the case of BP we are learning about worst practices in risk management, governance and compliance, not best practices.

British Petroleum’s lack of governance and risk management combined with our own government’s absence of regulatory compliance and oversight marks the beginning of a new era.  In this new era governance, compliance and corporate social responsibility will be driven primarily by non government organizations that are the voice of the people. It has become brutally obvious that large trans-national corporations can’t govern themselves, and more importantly the collaboration between them and governments, (in this case the oil lobby) facilitates an environment of risk and recklessness in the management of natural resources.

After experiencing a near collapse of our financial system, we know now what a joke Sarbanes Oxley has become and that the government regulatory apparatus completely failed.

The hard truth is that our government is challenged to:

·         Manage our natural resources and fisheries

·         Manage our financial system

·         Manage our healthcare system

·         Manage and/or regulate the safety of our food supply

·         Manage or control our borders

British Petroleum is a trans-national corporation active in thirty countries with more than 22,000 service stations and sixteen refineries, and they upstream 2.3 million barrels of oil a day. BP reported 2009 revenues of $239 Billion, a profit of $14B so why can’t they manage their risk and govern themselves, they certainly have the resources?

BP’s Code of Conduct

“A fundamental BP commitment to comply with all applicable legal requirements and with high ethical standards”

I copied the code of conduct from their overly green and seemingly environment friendly website, but there is something about this statement that says who they are. Compliance with all legal requirements, hum what does that mean? Well it means that they will go only as far as the law of any country requires and not further. This is in essence is their problem; they need to go further than applicable legal requirements in the high risk and “high profit” business they run. Compliance with “high ethical standards” is about as vague as you can get and we know they vary with culture, country and company. So what BP is really saying is that we only go as far as we need to and we don’t go the extra mile because it might affect profitability and this is further reinforced by the following quote from their CEO Tony Hayward.

“We are responsible for our operations and we are accountable for setting and observing consistent and high standards within them. Our code of conduct, for example, provides clear expectations on behavior and compliance.”

I had a higher view of BP until the disaster in the gulf exposed their lack of governance and risk management. BP put up $500 million for a bio-fuels research center at the University of California at Berkeley and that is great, but now they have a PR and brand disaster of unprecedented magnitude on their hands. And in my view they have fueled the fire so to speak by setting up a live feed of the well leaking for weeks on end. Perhaps some good will emerge from this when all oil companies take a call to action and re-examine their risk management and governance across operations.

Enter the NGO

Non Government Organizations like the World Wildlife Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council have now been put in a position of power and truly have the opportunity to be the voice of the people because government has failed. Those who oppose egalitarian groups and view them as zealots and extremists in some ways will rethink their role in world business. Like Exxon, BP will recover from this event and we can only hope they will live up to their responsibility in this terrible environmental disaster.  NGOs now have the power of social media at their disposal and we know that NGOs and many non- profit organizations are harnessing that power to gain influence and audience.

As a student of at the University of Massachusetts College of Food and Natural Resources I learned about the management of our planet’s resources and was taught that there are three principal approaches to managing natural resources:

·         Preservation

·         Conservation

·         Exploitation

 In the beginning many egalitarian groups advocated preservation of natural resources which was and is in direct conflict with the exploitation of our resources, the management approach still prevalent today driven by our capitalist system. This put NGOs at great odds with government and industry and their radicalism challenged many people including the scientific community. Times have certainly changed as NGOs now are important players in the global economy and can significantly impact brand reputation through their influence.

Conservation of natural resources employs management practices that enable the resource to be sustainably harvested and maintained for our children. This means that resources are not irreversibly damaged like our fisheries populations, many of which will never recover from over-harvesting and exploitation. In the case of oil, it is not a sustainable resource; there is only so much of it on our planet. That does not give license to energy harvesters to haphazardly manage operations and put other natural resources and industries at risk, such as fisheries and tourism. NGOs have a greater responsibility than ever in ensuring that large multi-nationals and governments are looking out for the best interest of their people. Join an NGO today and make your voice heard, your state senator, local representative and/or government may not be looking out for your best interest, unless of course you are in California where our governor  Arnold “just said no” to just drill baby and off shore drilling!

Further Reading: Why We Hate the Oil Companies, by John Hofmeister

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Economics of Social Business

I have asked Natalie Petouhoff to join me in writing this week’s blog post. Natalie was a leading CRM analyst at the Forrester Group and I enjoyed meeting and spending time with her at the SCRM conference with the father of SCRM Paul Greenberg in Virginia. Natalie gets it and has teamed up with a colleague to create new models and metrics to measure the economic impact and business value of being social business. As you all know I am always on the bleeding edge of everything in whatever industry I am in and I am excited about participating in Natalie’s research.  I also think that this will be a thought provoking post.  In my section I have identified the economic pillars of social business; Natalie will provide us with some insights on how we might measure the impact of social media on the bottom line, so here goes.

The social media tsunami is disrupting and impacting many aspects of business today including product development, CRM, thought leadership, corporate marketing, sales and lead generation, brand management and influencer relations. Defining and understanding the economic ramifications of its impact is the question of the hour? B2P companies have been quick to adapt to this disruptive change in communications and have already begun to leverage it for competitive advantage, but most B2B companies have been slow to react and engage. What are the parameters that need to be measured and by what metrics?

The Economic Pillars of a Social Business

·         Product Development-Innovation is now outside in.

·         CRM- managing the challenging social customer.

·         Thought leadership-business leaders can engage and drive influence by engaging.

·         Sales and lead generation-is easier than ever in volume.

·         Brand management-you can’t hide.

·         Influencer relations-they now own you and your brand.

 And how is social media impacting business?

• Impacting call centers and what are the added costs or cost savings?
• How are companies recruiting and training social media savvy employees?
• How many companies now have swat teams following Facebook pages and Tweets about their company, products and service?
• How are companies engaging with the new influencers (bloggers) and managing their brand?
• How are companies engaging with the new influencers and managing their influence?
• How are companies creating content pertinent to their industries and establishing thought leadership from within?
• Are Facebook fan pages effective means of advertising and lead generation?
• How are companies and organizations building communities of interest to enhance their brand experience?
• Will advertizing on Twitter pay off?

In Reality

Proctor and Gamble is using social media to drive product development and test pricing, Ford is using it to build communities around car launches, SAP is using it to accelerate innovation, software development and integration in its ecosystem, Indium is leveraging its blogs to establish thought leadership in its industry and engage new customers, and it seems like every winery in California now has a Facebook page.  So how are they measuring the business value of social media and how should we think about it?

Measurement by Natalie

 

The way that I approach measurement is first start with how you are currently measuring success in your business. What are the benefits of what you are doing? When you look at those benefits, what metrics do you use to know if something has improved or gotten better?  And then ask yourself, "What the value of that "something" if it gets better-- i.e., what does it add to the bottom line? 

The tricky part is to then apply social media to your business and know what the affect it’s going to have on it. That means really understanding your current business and the value conversations and also learning something new... i.e., the benefits and value of social media to traditional disciplines like marketing, PR, customer service, product development.

In working on ROI models, what I found was that when a company fully engages in social media, it sort of doesn't matter where they start. If they are really paying attention -- listening and interacting, what they will find is information that is critical to every single department. That kind of listening is new for most companies -- i.e., they are used to pushing content and information out... and not really getting a lot of feedback... In essence, doing social business means change. It means changing how you listen, how you measure, how you respond and howyou run your company. Some companies "get" it and others... they may never understand this new world!

 

Silo Busting is Key to Achieving the Customer Centric Enterprise

Data, data everywhere, but no one knows where it is or how to find it, let alone use it to create a customer centric enterprise. Organizations and companies are so siloed they can’t get a 360 degree view of their customers. They are so siloed by politics, organizational structures, culture, poor data management and resistance to change that they can’t help themselves. The age of the data warehouse and the single subject data mart has passed but still we can’t see all of our customer’s data. Why? We have sophisticated data analysis tools that include predictive analytics and even OLAP, but we still can’t see the customer. And now there is the promise of In-memory data bases, which may enable and real time data mining of online transaction processing systems. This is certainly something that everyone has wanted, but will this enable us to see all of our customer’s data? I sincerely doubt it.

On Friday my Internet went down and I had to call COMCAST, unfortunately they had to send a technician. The technician called me but did not know what he was being sent out for, he didn’t have my data. My DVD player died during the week and I went to Best Buy and got a new one. They offered me a three year line of credit on a new TV without interest, but they wanted me to fill out a credit application. Are they for real? I have purchased products from them every year in cash, they should know who I am, don’t you think? Why don’t they don’t who I am, they had my data did they lose it?

It has been almost three years now since I began my sixth startup experience, SAP’s Business Influencer Group, (BIG). BIG is the second startup I have attempted in a large organization, the first was Gartner’s G2 Group a technology research unit focused on industries. SAP’s BIG and Gartner’s G2, however, have come with all the challenges that startup people face in a large organization; achieving high levels of business velocity and the inability of people to look at things differently and adapt to change.

My first visit as Head of the BIG group was to Harvard Business School where I met one of today’s most important academic influencers Ranjay Gulati. Ranjay researches everything customer focused and in May of 2007 he published an HBR Spotlight Article on Customer Focus, Silo Busting: How to Execute on the Promise of Customer Focus. As you might imagine, I spend a great deal of my personal time keeping up with important academic research that aligns with our company’s business initiatives and I think that Ranjay’s Silo Busting research was well ahead of it time. For anyone involved in anything customer related this article is a must read and I think it is one of the most undervalued articles I have come across over the last three years.

 

 

Ranjay’s Four Cs of Customer Focused Solutions

In Silo Busting Ranjay profiles Jones Lang LaSalle a commercial real estate provider, Cisco, General Electric’s Medical Care Systems, and interestingly enough Best Buy. Ranjay invented a seemingly simple approach to creating a systemic customer centric enterprise, the four Cs.

Coordination-Cooperation-Capability-Connection

The four Cs might look simple at first but making it happen requires that scary word, change. And there needs to be top down support for anything like this to even have a chance of surviving in any organization or company. I won’t go into them in detail, but his four Cs span, the realms of change management, technology, organizational culture, metrics, training and knowledge management. I would think for many organizations this would be a best practice in becoming a customer centric organization and I think it’s one of the reasons why Ranjay is now a Harvard professor.

Silos of Data Prevent Customer Focus

Enter me the social customer. As a social customer I expect business and all organizations that I interact with to know me. And no I don’t want to join their fan page on Facebook. I want them to know me, and interact with me in a way that demonstrates this? Those companies and organizations that demonstrate this will get my business and interactions. Those that don’t will be out of mind. I am a social customer and I want you to be prepared to interact with me in the way that I want to, and most likely in the future that will be through my smart phone or IPad. Don’t put my data in a silo where no one can see it! Use it to make me the social customer happy and engaged. 

Business Model Innovation: Blue Ocean Your Startup Thinking

When I think about what to post each week, foremost in my mind is how I can leverage my startup experience into actionable information that you can use in your business. Startups and small businesses as you all know operate at business velocities that are significantly higher than most companies. Most of the time you are too busy selling, providing services and/or producing product and you don’t have time to think, strategize and vision. I have learned that this can be an important time to stop, think, and look closely at where you are and what the road ahead could be like if you visioned it out and prepared for the growth ahead. It is also an important time to evaluate your long term business model and look for ways of optimizing business critical processes. As Socrates once said “the very thing that made you great will be your undoing,” and how many times have we heard CEOs say, “We made the biggest mistake when we were at the top of our game.” This week’s post is all about seeing the forest and the trees at the same time and creating an organizational culture of thinkers that think things through in pursuit of the Holy Grail, sustainable and profitable business model innovation.

 

One of my favorite business books is Blue Ocean Strategy, written by Professors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne of INSEAD, now one of the world’s leading business schools. Blue Ocean Strategy features a great Cirque Du Soleil case study of how to take the best of an old business model and mold it into a new successful one by using the attractive elements of the original model. Cirque as we all know has been wildly successful and has attained global appeal. Blue Ocean thinking can separate the “life style” startups from high growth companies with tremendous potential. I was lucky enough to work with the Cirque founders in the early days of their evolution and helped build some of their internal business processes and workflow engines, which at the time were way ahead of any potential competitors.

 

In my view, Blue Ocean thinking is a key element of any entrepreneurial visionary planning process. Getting out of your own Idaho so to speak, is often a great way to gain new perspective and generate ideas on where you currently are and your vision for the future. We accomplished this in several of my startups by having regular visioning discussions, and we also organized retreats away from the office with key officers and stakeholders in the company. It may sound like herding cats; however, if you bring in outsiders that can help facilitate the meetings and generally keep them on track; you will be much more successful than attempting to do it yourself. I would love to hear from you if you think differently about this strategy.

 

Visioning off sites are not uncommon in Silicon Valley and it is important to conduct them at seminal intervals in a startup company’s development. They are usually associated with revenue thresholds such as $5M, $20 or $100M. I can tell you from experience that off sites of any kind are not for everyone. And it is always in your best interest to carefully architect the offsite team’s chemistry to include just the right combination team members that are visionaries vs. those who are more execution oriented. I will again refer to Lynda Gratton’s excellent book, Hot Spots, as a reference guide to assembling the right team chemistry. Lynda’s research at the London Business School has focused on analyzing the team chemistry/organizational structure and how companies fail and/or are successful in reaching team objectives. Ms Gratton’s research was published in HBR early last year and reviewed more than 80 company’s team building efforts and results, www.hotspotsmovements.com.

 

Results from off sites can deliver amazing results in my experience and bond together executives and regular staff in ways that you never imagined. Make sure to clearly set objectives and if possible break out into sales, marketing and product oriented groups, with each bringing back their own vision of success. The focus is always on the bottom line, seeking sustainable profitable growth and applying what I call “joint value assessments” to business models and processes. Engaged and empowered executives and staff can bring out the best ideas for optimizing individual processes and models to meet the growth demands of the company. Always remember that the most valuable capital in your company is the human capital, and sales does not fix everything all the time, as some pundits say.

 

 The Personality of Fish: The Mole Crab 

At approximately twenty miles out to sea all scents of land and earth disappear and the smell of the ocean dominates. Last week we talked about the ocean being a river of rivers and we followed some of the rivers, visited with their inhabitants and experienced the unique personality of the Portuguese Man o War. One of the amazing things about going to sea for several weeks is the unique scent of the different water masses, and just like fish these water masses have their own personality, including destructive forces like warm core rings and the havoc they bring onto larval fish populations. This week we come closer to shore and enter the hostile world of the surf break zone and experience the life of Emerita, the Mole crab.

 

One of the most hostile places to live on our planet is within the surf or intertidal zone, where thousands of tons of water regularly crash onto sandy beaches, rocky outcroppings, breakwaters and barrier islands. Animals and plants that exist in this zone are some of the toughest on the planet and are regularly exposed to extremes of heat, cold, water and pressure. Mole crabs live in one of the safest places to exist in this environment, just below the surface of the sand and away from the pounding waves. I am sure you have watched birds running along the wave breaks probing the sand with their beaks in the wash zone of beaches; they are in search of mole crab colonies. Mole crabs are slightly bigger than the size of a human thumb and live along most beaches worldwide. In some parts of the world Mole crabs provide an important source of protein are harvested regularly.

 Mole crabs are one of the few inhabitants of sandy beaches and they continually borrow into the sand moving up and down the beach with the tide sifting plankton and detritus from the wave wash. Female mole crabs are much larger than males who become almost parasitic during mating season by clinging to the females for weeks at a time. During the spring and fall the female’s bellies swell with hundreds of red orange eggs and they are eagerly hunted by birds in pursuit of a protein snack. Most people who have been to the beach never realize that there are Mole crab colonies of thousands just below their feet. Often in business innovations and optimizations are so obvious and simple that you can’t see them.

Until next time great marketing and selling in the Millennium!