
SugarCRM CEO talks customer engagement, selling, and the empowered digital consumer
The phrase “customer engagement” expresses the value and importance of interacting with buyers. We all want prospects and customers to interact positively with our brand and products. While unhappy customers often share their stories online, converting customers into fans, or even brand advocates, is another story altogether. On one level, it’s simple. If customers love […]

OpenDNS? Google DNS? Comcast? Surprising Results.
I’ve been a long time OpenDNS user (hardcoded in my router), but after installing a new router, I decided to run some tests before reconfiguring its DNS settings. The results – using Google’s own Namebench tool – were surprising. Comcast wins! (note: 68.87.76.182 resolves to cns.sanjose.ca.sanfran.comcast.net). It is faster than UltraDNS, OpenDNS or Google Public […]

How Comcast Approaches Social CRM
Since I’m speaking on the topic of Social CRM at the New Comm Forum in April, I decided to reach out to a few folks to get their ideas and impressions on what’s going on in the space. One of the people I reached out to was Frank Eliason from Comcast (many of you may […]

AT and T starts blaming customers for downloading too much
Usually the first rule of business is that the customer is right always. Well maybe not so much according to AT&T, especially when it comes to the Iphone and data “hogs”. While unlimited plans usually mean unlimited, it looks like unlimited is soon going to mean caps, and extra charges for well, using your unlimited […]

Comcast Data Usage Meter: What’s to Celebrate About Being a Year Late?
I admit I’m baffled. If a major service provider imposes consumption caps without providing a way to measure consumption, then promises a metering tool and fails to deliver for a year, than what exactly is the reason to celebrate when finally they start limited testing a year late? But that’s exactly what’s happening: Comcast keeps […]

Social Media is the New Collaboration
When we look at corporate frameworks and how we use collaboration and innovation across corporate boundaries, including collaborating with other companies to get a product out to market we are looking at social networking. We just have a fancy new label for it, but in the longer run, what we saw as collaborative teaming and […]

Gnomedex Day 2: Beginning of the Wrap Up
Gnomedex Day 2 was well worth visiting, mostly about the social part of social networking and how we use technology to do things, accomplish goals, or support folks. The more interesting example of the group was Bongo The Movie, where people raised money to help a band in Tunisia make an album. The best speech […]

Social Monitoring – Exploring the Midspace
I received an email from a friend the other day who was searching for a social media monitoring service for the company he works for – they’re a few years old, have a few thousand customers and are generating enough “buzz” to warrant more than the basic Google search, Twitter search routine. The next step […]

Radian6 – Aggregating Opinion
I’ve long been a proponent of new web plays looking to find an offering that aggregate rather than create content. In this world there is no end of data available to us but what we lack is ways to aggregate that data, obtain analysis from it and, at the end of the day, derive insight […]

The Social Media Customer Care Machinery
Comcast Customer Service s*cks Comcast Offers Great Customer Service on Twitter. Both are true. Frank Eliason, the Customer Service Director behind @comcastcares is now a Social Media star, being invited to speaking engagement left and right. The buzz surrounding @comcastcares served as eye opener to many other companies who are jumping on Twitter in his […]

Can Social Media Customer Care Scale? Should it Scale?
Frank Eliason is a Comcast employee. – how … uninteresting. Frank Eliason is a Social Media Celebrity – how exciting. Both are true. Frank is better known as @comcastcares on Twitter – he is the Customer Service Director who came up with the idea to use Twitter in an effort to improve the Cable Giant’s […]

Broadband Bandwidth Cap and Cloud Computing
Image via CrunchBase From yesterday, Comcast has started implementing a 250 GB bandwidth cap on users browsing the net with their service. They argue that this will stop power users from hijacking the pipe in a neighborhood. This is pretty insane and it has evoked lots of criticism from the blogosphere including the “Metering will […]