Skype – the mysterious money bubble
This morning I wrote this post already in one tweet: 2003: Skype founded. 2005: bought by eBay $2.5B (60m users). 2009: sold by eBay $2.8B (450m users). 2011: bought by MSFT $8B (700m users) That was after a very quick 5 minute analysis of a few tweets, posts and web sites. Now I’ve finally found […]
Implementing Social: don’t use the C-word
The C-word is being used quite frequently these days. I have had quite a few dialogues and discussions about it, and it almost looks like the C-word is the new black – or white, in this case. To me, it shows that Social is hitting mainstream and getting implemented here and there. Maybe the evangelists […]
The Schmarketing MQ
With the above picture hardly legible on purpose, let me tell you a small story. Three months ago I was contacted by Derek Singleton with a question about a poll on his company site. I liked the company, liked the site, liked the poll, so wrote a small post about it This week, Hunter Richards […]
From product to service: stealing first base?
The other day I read a post about how someone in a poor country is making a living by taking his washing machine across town (rather: slum) and selling it “by the wash”, thus turning a product into a service. The rationale in this specific case is cheap washing machines from abroad pushing existing ones […]
A new kind of Capgemini Consulting, errrrr attrition
I was attended on Twitter to this thoughtless, clumsy, mindless piece by Peter Sayer on PCWorld: Capgemini Consulting, a specialist in strategy and transformation, is about to transform its own strategy for the second time in two years. To cope with the change, the company plans to recruit up to 1,000 staff this year, predominantly […]
Social Business Revolution
Social Business (R)evolution by Martijn Linssen (sample) The current world is abuzz about Social. Social networks, social media, Social Business: all things social. People, Twitterati and even a small number of companies embrace the diverse ideas and notions of Social, trying to sell and implement them That movement is a natural counter reaction to […]
Twitter delegates the monetisation strain to its developers
On the Twitter Development Google Group, Twitter announced today that they’ll stop whitelisting. Whitelisting basically lifts an application developer’s limitation of 150 Twitter requests per hour, that mere mortals suffer from Beginning today, Twitter will no longer grant whitelisting requests. We will continue to allow whitelisting privileges for previously approved applications; however any unanswered requests […]
The simple secret to knowledge curation
Of all the Social Tools out there, most if not all of it is free text to the power of three. Notwithstanding the huge progress made – getting conversations in writing and saving them for eternity – it gets increasingly harder to make heads or tails of them. Why favour conversation or thread A over […]
Social Enterprise Magic Quadrant
Debate and savviness seems to be flying across the Twitter verse these days, Stowe Boyd wrote a post about that One quote there: And Dennis has been making his displeasure about the use of the term ‘social business’ known, but not by arguing about the principles involved. Instead, Howlett has adopted a ‘savviness’ cant: he […]
Advertising – paying for our free(mium) world for how long?
Ads – no wiki definition needed this time I think. I recommended TweetCaster to Thijs Muis the other day, for Android, and the first thing he said after installing it was: @MartijnLinssen has ads! Not my app so far, but @tweetdeck isn’t the best either. I don’t see ads anymore. Well maybe I see them, […]
Mark Zuckerberg no longer a social norm
A few days ago Mark Zuckerberg was offered another podium at San Fransisco’s Crunchies, where he dared to state that privacy was no longer a social norm: “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people,” he said. “That social norm is just something […]
A record store – who needs one these days?
This morning I read in the newspapers – wait what am I saying? In the old-fashioned newspaper I actually encountered news, yes. Well it wasn’t global news of course, but national, and pertained to music. Anyway, it was news – that’s a first since a year or so. A celebrated Dutch performer, Trijntje Oosterhuis, announced […]
Enterprise microblogging should be pay-per-use
An article by Dennis Howlett about Socialtext and Yammer yesterday caught my attention. In essence SocialText announces that they’ll sell their product at 80% of Yammer’s price (being very brief here) but I think they’re both wrong. Social has its own Pareto rule: 90-9-1 versus the old-fashioned 80-20. It means that 1% of people creates […]
Social Customer Service – proving you failed?
A great comment by Guy Letts to my previous post on Acquisition versus Retention made me write this one – the comment is only half an hour old but blew my mind: There’s another example of how ridiculous is the pursuit of NEW rather than getting the basics right. Some large companies now boast of […]
Why acquisition beats retention
In a short conversation with Graham Hill today, the topic of acquisition versus retention was brought up. My response to Graham’s initial question was “human nature”: @GrahamHill: If only banks, utilities, telcos put as much effort into retaining customers as they did into acquiring them < human nature and my second one was elaborating on […]
