Dreamforce 2012 may officially be over, but we’re still having some fun that’s rolled over from last week’s big conference! During the event, we encouraged attendees to stop by our booth and “Be the Carrot”, posing for a picture in our FirstRain carrot photo op—both to have a bit of fun and to win a free iPad.
Now, all the participants’ carrot photos have all been tweeted out from our FirstRain Twitter account and have also been placed into our “Be the Carrot” Facebook album on the FirstRain Facebook page—they are quite entertaining so make sure to check them out!
The winner will be whichever ‘Carrot’ gets the most retweets and/or Facebook ‘Likes’ for their picture, and many people’s campaigns are now in full gear to win that iPad! One contestant already has over 250 Facebook Likes! And if you’re a participant who hasn’t yet started your campaign, don’t despair, you still have a couple more days to encourage everyone—colleagues, friends and family—to spread the word and get as many people as you can (no robots, please!) to go retweet and Facebook-Like your photo by 5 PM PT, Friday, September 28th, the contest deadline. Whoever receives the most retweets and/or Facebook Likes by that time will win the iPad!
We will announce the winner at the end of the week, so make sure to retweet and Like your favorite photo!
Have you ever thought about how, when you are in a specific situation or have something very important on your mind, you begin to see it all around you? For example if you have ever been pregnant—ALL you see around you are other pregnant women, as if it were a global pregnancy epidemic! Last week Steven Feinberg visited our office and I learned about our brain’s reticular activating system (RAS), the part of the brain that recognizes patterns and “makes sense” of your experience. Your brain does this by looking for evidence to prove your beliefs—yes, the part of your brain that spots all those other pregnant women, or all the Mini Coopers on the road!
So maybe it is my reticular activating system acting up because it was another BIG Monday morning for Social Business Big Data in my content streams.
Here are some highlights:
“Why Big Data Will Deliver ROI For Social Business“ If you are at all interested or affected by social business, then you have probably heard of Dion Hinchcliffe, whose focus has been social business and next-gen enterprises working with some of the biggest companies out there. In this post in InformationWeek, he talks about driving forward very real business outcomes by harvesting the missing social business intelligence capability within most organizations. You can follow @dhinchcliffe for daily knowledge of social business.
“Business Intelligence (BI) Trends Go Beyond Analytics” on Forbes.com by SiliconANGLE’s Editor Kristen Nicole. This popped up on my radar because it mentioned what we are doing at FirstRain, by adding context to the data FirstRain finds and packaging it up for business use so a sales professional can immediately understand their customers.
“Why Context Matters—Forget Real-Time, Achieve Right-Time” this one goes back a couple of weeks but I just found it and, although it is B2C focused, had a key point that addresses the B2B Social Business harvesting of Big Data:
“Customers and employees only want engagement aligned with self interest. Relevancy of information is required for customers and employees to respond. Real-time interactions quickly evolve into noise. Signal to noise ratios must be improved as garbage in will lead to massive garbage out. In some cases, customers don’t want engagement. They just want the experience.“
“Can Data Science Save the US Economy?” Saroj Kar, takes a slightly different take on the importance of Big Data by focusing in on the data scientists:
“In recent months in the U.S. alone, large organizations, from staffing companies to universities, have seen a growing interest in a new professional class around data. A curious mix of business expertise, analysis and information technology, this new title is underway in various vertical markets such as energy, commerce, healthcare and financial services. And if experts are right, this is just the beginning.”
I found this article because it mentioned our CEO Penny Herscher’s recent TEDx talk on how “Coding is the New Literacy “. It not only highlights what we see in the marketplace as a real need for business skills but how FirstRain delivers (in doing the ’heavy-lifting’ of data analysis for business users) such value to our customers—of course we have a team full of data scientists ourselves!
Have you seen more articles on the subject that we should highlight? Tweet them to me @danielabarbosa
Image| Flickr| adopted raebrune
I must be a horrible target for a sales person. I don’t listen to cold call voicemails, I delete 99% of the spam emails I receive and, if a sales person is lucky enough to get me live, they have about 10 seconds to catch my attention before I tune out.
But I am not unusual. My short attention span and company-selfish interests are typical of the busy exec. And this is something too many sales people don’t take into account. They talk about their products and their needs, not my company’s needs.
In one study:
and there is simply no excuse for this any more!
In the recent report on Sales Intelligence the Aberdeen Group not surprisingly found that the types of intelligence that are most useful are the higher level ones — company and competitor, not the basic contact data most sales teams get equipped with. [Note: Image removed from this post by request of Aberdeen]
We see this need again and again. If you want to get through to an executive (like me) you need to understand my business. What drives my business, what I am trying to achieve, and what’s impacting my customers decisions.
Having my social profile, while cute, can actually make a salesperson annoying. Just because you contact me on Twitter or send me an Inmail is not going to make me respond— in fact if it is a cheesy message without substance I am not going to pay any more attention just because your message is on social media. On the very rare occasions an email gets through my filter it’s because it speaks to my business needs.
The solutions exist today to equip your sales team with smart customer and competitor intelligence right in their workflow. Within the CRM, tailored to the market the rep is in, configured to make it easy for the rep to review the customer intelligence and so be knowledgeable about how he/she can impact the customer’s business—and so talk about the customers need first!
So if you want to sell directly to executives, do your homework about their business first or you are wasting your time as well as theirs.
I have been known to get home and pour myself a cocktail once in a while (usually a gin and ginger-ale mix with a fresh Meyer lemon from the tree outside). With a little one in the house, dinner is pretty much happening before the ice cubes even start to melt—so, yes, I have had a cocktail with my dinner. And since my daily information consumption is substantially social, when Chris Moody, COO of Gnip, kicked off the Big Boulder conference talking about ‘Social Cocktails‘, I was all ears. It was then I immediately knew that I was in for two days of good content and smart people (and perhaps a couple of cocktails)—and I wasn’t disappointed.
Unlike many other social data conferences I have been to, the first example that Chris brought up on stage was an Enterprise use case—not a PR/marketing/brand management/customer service one—but an actual example of how an industrial parts supplier can use a ‘Social Cocktail’ that can include Twitter, Blogs, Comments, etc., to find early signals that can indicate an opportunity or a risk in their supply chain.
How refreshing, I thought, a conference where I perhaps won’t have to constantly explain that what FirstRain delivers with FirstTweets is not about monitoring and measuring media, but about business intelligence derived from social content.
Clare Tischer, wrote a comprehensive post on Chris’s presentation that you can read here and one of the slides he used (which I have replicated from my notes below) was of particular interest around ‘fast’ and ‘deep’ social data and how they are used within the Enterprise.
Although Chris said that the descriptions of the different groups were not representative of all business units that can take advantage of the ‘Social Cocktail’, there are two specifically that were not on the graphic that I think are very important because they are direct revenue producing groups that our FirstRain solutions target.
The business needs of Major Account or Global Sales, for example, are just quite different than those of a PR Manager. Take, for example, use cases we are seeing with Enterprise Sales Account Managers who are using FirstRain with FirstTweets. As I have written before, typical coverage for territory and market coverage may require:
Meanwhile, market Intelligence teams are often looking for a comprehensive view into the movements of their industry peers, partners, competitors and top customers, keyword searches on monitoring platforms sometimes are not enough and can’t scale across the volume of things they look for and need to find, including:
FirstRain’s patented business-content filtering engines analyze a wide range of global content, including news, blogs, PR, company Web sites, government filings and Twitter of course—extracting only business-relevant intelligence from around the world—without the consumer-related noise that many other social media monitoring tools do a great job at for brands to monitor and support customers.
In part two of my Big Boulder post, I will go more into the other sessions and the messages from the data providers. But overall, the conference was an excellent place to learn more about the value of social data and many of the conversations I had with other attendees and panelists. The conference not only validated, but proved, that with FirstTweets we are taking the right approach to incorporating the ‘Social Cocktail’ for our clients by leveraging our ability to extract and deliver precise, high-value customer intelligence.
(Social Cocktail Menu – Photo credit: www.theverge.com)
You’ve been in that meeting. HR’s leading the annual performance review process and you’re being asked to rank your team members with their peers. In larger companies you’re probably being asked to force your team into a bell curve of the top 20%, middle 60% and bottom 20%, or your HR person is talking about “the lifeboat test” (what order would you throw your employees out of the boat), or if you work for Intel maybe you’re being asked to do a literal forced ranking.
It’s a tried and tested HR process. Rank your employees, make sure they fit a bell curve, assign bonuses and merit increases accordingly, fit the merit increase budget that’s been approved at the top. And you’ll be told you’re a bad manager if you think half your team is truly excellent.
Makes sense right? People fit on a bell curve of performance don’t they?
The answer is no, especially not in technology. And as the recent Vanity Fair article about Microsoft points out, this approach to employees is an innovation killer. Kurt Eichenwald’s excellent article about the Microsoft “lost decade” points the finger at many of the reasons Microsoft lost it’s innovation mojo, and one is the adherence to stack ranking. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited
stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft,
something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald
writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day
knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to
get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was
going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It
leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than
competing with other companies.”
So this case is extreme, clearly. But I’ve seen it. I’ve been in the room, cringing.
Ranking has a role to play and can be useful, but as a CEO, or team leader, you have to be thoughtful about why you are doing it.
Where the process can be very helpful is to make sure you identify your top performers. Who are the people that really make a difference again and again? If you get your managers in a room and debate that question it’s great to see leaders advocating for their people: why they are great, why they are one of our best, what their impact is on the company and it’s growth. This discussion should lead to a list of people you, as the leader, want to pay close attention to. Are they well taken care of? do they have plenty of stock options? are they paid well relative to the market? do you spend enough time with them? is their manager working with them on their career path and training? would they benefit from a mentor? All good questions that you should know the answers to for your top performers. They are your innovation engine.
It’s also good to force the discussion of the bottom performers. Not to hold a witch hunt, but to make sure your managers are not being lazy and keeping someone in the organization who should not be there. If an employee is not performing everyone around them knows it, it’s probably because they are in the wrong job, and it’s weighing down everyone around them. Forcing the conversation of who the bottom 10% are can illuminate who should be moved on, or who maybe needs some extra help, or moved into a different job within your company.
Forcing a stack rank through the whole population leads to politics without having any business benefit. HR loves it because it’s a clean process that helps them manage the budget, but as deeply technical companies (like Rambus where I chair the compensation committee of the board) know: if you have a world class technical team a great deal more than 20% of them are excellent.
When your goal is to innovate you want to build a team where more than half of them are truly spectacular in their field, and where you demand excellence from everyone. In innovative R&D teams you need a zero tolerance policy for low quality work – and yet at the same time you need to tolerate some failure. Innovation takes risk, risk means some failure. When you are developing new products the concept of stack ranking your team into a mediocre group in the middle is the kiss of death! You simply cannot afford mediocre.
The one team where a stack rank can be useful is sales. Sales is the ultimate measurable job – everyone sees the score card every month. I know a CEO who ran a large CAD company in the 90s and he would fire the bottom 10% of his sales team each quarter on principle. The company was wildly successful, but it had a brutal sales culture. But when you live by the numbers you die by the numbers and so firing the bottom 10% each quarter created the focus on results that CEO wanted.
So what do I do? I run a process, once a year, with my FirstRain leadership team to discuss who the top performers are. Which team members are doing really great work – innovating, delivering excellent technology, winning major accounts – who’s making the difference? It’s always a lively debate. Some of the same names are (of course) on the list every year. It’s exciting to see some new employees join the list quickly, or existing employees move up because they’re growing and their excellence is emerging. It’s a fun discussion and we use it to make sure we are taking care of the people who are making all the difference building the company. And I challenge managers on the non-performers. Beyond that, I think stack ranking is a bureaucracy we don’t need.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/80155873@N02/7181568367/in/photostream
Next week, FirstRain COO YY Lee is traveling east to Boston for the 2012 Enterprise 2.0 Conference. Enterprise 2.0 is an annual conference & expo for social enterprise tools and technologies. The conference focuses on the importance of embracing new enterprise technologies, as they are developed, in order to maintain competitive advantage within your industry. It’s a subject of great interest of FirstRain and our customers, and we’re really happy to be participating in this great conference this year.
The conference takes place from June 18th- June 21st, 2012, at the Hynes Convention Center. YY is a special guest this year, participating as a panelist on the “Innovation versus Integration” panel, which takes place on June 19th at 2:30pm in room 311. The panel, led by Oliver Marks, will discuss how new technologies are influencing the current role of HR and how they are directly changing companies’ innovation.
Make sure to follow us on Twitter @firstrain for continuous updates on Enterprise 2.0.
To learn more about the Enterprise 2.0 conference, visit http://www.e2conf.com/boston/.
Note: This post was originally posted on my personal blog “Chitchating about Information Delivery” on June 11th, 2012
Last night, the TV was on- only the dog was watching, but as i walked by i noticed this:
On Dateline NBC, the ubiquitous peacock on the left side of the screen and #DATELINE the Twitter hashtag on the other. I have seen #hashtags on many a commercial, news show etc. and often even within TV shows, the Tweet this with #hashtag bla bla bla – but haven’t really seen it being used as part of the brand name of a show so blatanly (ok i admit i don’t watch much real-time TV, so correct me if i am wrong!).
It reminded me of a blog post I read a while ago about Facebook, where the author made what i thought at the time was a very astute point about the following URL- www.facebook.com/nike . Why would Nike who has one of the most recognized brands in the world be willing to supersede their branding with facebook’s? Had facebook ubiquitously become the brand identifier for big brands? I couldn’t find that post or the author as i wrote this, but i think it went on to talk about how Facebook was going to be the defacto platform.
Now, most of us when we think about hashtags think about Twitter- no doubt #hashtag adoption started becoming mainstream with Twitter. The # symbol, called a hashtag, is typically used to mark a keyword or topic in a Tweet. Any user can categorize or create hashtags or follow and search topics using Twitter or various services built on top of Twitter. I remember seeing #hashtags start in August 2007 and becoming excited about the power they could have in information delivery and consumption.
But hashtags are used in many other applications, take for example Enterprise Social Networks (ESNs) like Yammer or Salesforce’s Chatter- that encourage the use of the #hashtags for classification, to find other people talking about specific topics, to display the ‘categorized’ content within one view etc.
If you have been reading my blog for a while, then you know i have been talking about ‘tagging’ for a while and even wrote a very popular ebook on the subject. Hashtags are just an extension of tagging, but the conversations that occur around them make them way more valuable then traditional tags- that were mostly consumed by search engines.
So this morning, i was reading this TechCrunch article on Twitter’s new Brand pages, that launched with #NASCAR. Since #hashtags were on my brain with the #DATELINE revelation i had last night- i thought it was very timely since i have had a #hashtag post coming anyway.
From the Twitter Blog, you can learn a bit more about how these Brand pages are created. In describing how the Pocono 400 race was covered through #NASCAR it states “Throughout the weekend – but especially during the race – a combination of algorithms and curation will surface the most interesting Tweets to bring you closer to all of the action happening around the track, from the garage to the victory lane.” -
It will be interesting to learn more about how Twitter is creating these Brand pages, what control will the brands themselves will have (are they the curators or is Twitter??), how will the algorithms work? Are they automatically removing tweets that would be brand offensive?, how valuable it will be to consumers, how long before people start to ‘game’ the system and how will Twitter combat that- and ultimately how else will #HASHTAGS create new consumption and interaction models for content inside and outside of Twitter?
Our world is surrounded by software. Every day teenagers spend more than 10 hours a day on line interfacing through a software layer – texting, facebook, tumblr, TV, movies – all are constructed in software and people use a software layer to interact. Even as a CEO, my day is dominated by software – Office apps, Twitter, Skype and even Words with Friends.
Software is changing our world in as profound a way as the book did starting in 1440. The book, following the invention of the printing press, democratized knowledge. Anyone who could read and write could share ideas and change the way other people thought. By 1500 there were 35,000 book titles in print and over 20MM books printed. 60 years after the invention of the computer the influence of software on our world is still growing exponentially.
And it touches everyone. Poor illiterate women in India running micro businesses through a cellphone. CEOs and bankers. Students at a Palo Alto High School. And so when I was invited to give a TEDx talk at Gunn High School two weeks ago I chose to talk about how being able to code – or at least understand enough structured logic to create software apps – is as important now as being able to read and write.
Technology is now where the jobs are, where the growth is, where the source of the major revolution of the next 100 years starts. It’s an exciting place to be and it’s a meritocracy. Everyone can learn it, just like everyone can learn to read and write.
Here’s my talk:
And the most exciting thing for me giving this talk was that at the end I was surrounded by teenage girls thrilled to have their interest in software and technology endorsed and confirmed by my talk.
Last Thursday I had the opportunity to participate in a panel discussion on digital privacy in Palo Alto hosted by the Business Association Italy America (BAIA), a network of entrepreneurs, managers and professionals focused on innovation. Personally, an event like this is always a bit of a stretch for an introvert like me, but I’m very glad I was coaxed out of my shell to engage on this important topic.
On the panel with me were two fascinating people, Professor Alessandro Acquisti and Andrea Vaccari. Andrea was a hot commodity that night, as he is co-founder and CEO of Glancee. Glancee had just been acquired by Facebook, and Facebook was going public the next day. Alessandro is a true expert in the field of Information Technology and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon.
As panel moderator Mary Trigiani put it, we were two Digital Immigrants and One Digital Native coming together, representing diverse perspectives. And the difference in perspective on on digital privacy issues between the Digital Natives in the room, who were more comfortable with their persona, behaviors, and lifestyle being out there and accessible on the Web was noticeable that night. The Digital Natives were not necessarily pushing the boundaries, but more were either unaware of the boundaries being pushed or not at all bothered by them, seemingly confident that things would be okay. The Digital Immigrants, on the other hand, expressed much more concern about how acquired data can be used by Companies for great good and great evil.
Alessandro shared his thought-provoking experiment, where he and a team of research analysts constructed a mobile App to generate a person’s social security number from a snapped photo of a stranger’s face. All based on freely available software, online databases, and statistical processing.
Andrea pointed out that we all leave “digital footprints”—data that is left behind, collected, and available for use. As an example, he related a story from Business Insider that told of how Target got into some hot water when they used observed shopping patterns to indicate women that are likely pregnant, and then used this statistically derived information to send coupons to those theoretically pregnant women. The technology proved to be so good that it exposed a teen girl’s pregnancy to her father when he found the coupons that had been sent to her.
In my view, this technology is still way ahead of the law. Living and working in Silicon Valley, every day we see analytics technology being applied relentlessly to redefine business and the way businesses work, online retailers challenging the way states levy sales tax, and online shopping experiences getting more and more targeted. Digital Privacy law requires legislation, and legislation is the purview of governments, regulatory bodies and advocacy groups—in other words, it’s not a speedy process. Structurally, legislative timelines will always lag the incredible pace of technology adoption, with the result being that most of what is technically feasible has not only not been regulated, but probably isn’t even being thought about yet in our legislative bodies.
In this digital privacy environment, many companies simply state they are “in compliance with all federal and state laws…”, but what does this really mean? Given this known lag, companies should be responsible for operating at a higher standard when deciding how to best to manage and protect information from inappropriate use. Setting internal privacy boundaries and codes of behavior proactively mitigates the negative effects of overstepping the mark and the subsequent consumer backlash. At FirstRain two of our core values are “Act with integrity at all times” and “Take ownership for the company’s success”. For us, keeping these values at the forefront helps maintain the balance between ethics and profit.
FirstRain provides our customers (B2B sales and marketing professionals) with relevant customer and industry information to increase revenue and strengthen relationships. Our users are business professionals who want to quickly and efficiently access only the information they require to drive revenue in their businesses. Now, the more we at FirstRain know about each customer, the better an intelligence solution we can then offer. But often they do not have the time or patience to enter a boat-load of personal preference information—and therefore the tension between relevance, business objectives and customer analytics. In this case, I believe the use of a thoughtful combination of “self-declared” information, combined with “observed” behavior (e.g., likes/dislikes, click-throughs, etc.) and “inferred” statistics can make a massive difference. The key is using the information with integrity and only for the intended purpose of delivering an improved customer experience.
I am concerned about digital privacy, and the lack of tools for consumers to access, verify and fix incorrect or inaccurate information out there. I am also sure that in the years ahead we will see businesses continue to push the digital privacy boundaries. There will be some notable scares, subsequent backlashes and regulatory adjustments. However, I am personally also looking forward to a massively improved user experience.
A big thank you goes to our hosts Giorgio Ghersi and Mary Trigiani at BAIA, for being wonderful hosts, and our own Daniela Barbosa, here at FirstRain, for her tireless focus on making sure this introvert turned up and participated.
Today’s Facebook’s IPO although a more consumer focused interest story then what most of our customers are interested in, brought a huge amount of tweets on the subject as expected. (I would even venture to say that it was more then a ‘consumer interest story’ but rather a ‘human interest story’). None the less, being that FirstRain is a Silicon Valley based company, the buzz is also being felt strongly outside the digital world for those of us that live here and have friends and acquaintances that are being directly impacted by facebook’s IPO. Exciting times.
Yesterday, prior to Facebook’s IPO we ran some stats using our FirstTweets™ technology and then redid the same exercise at the close of the market today. FirstTweets™ uses our patented FirstRain technology to uncover and deliver only high-quality, business-relevant tweets to sales and marketing professionals across the enterprise. Our analysis shows that less than 0.1% of daily tweets contain quality, business-related content, yet this still represents more than 200,000 tweets per day of business-focused intelligence.
The picture painted by the stats that we captured, aren’t surprising but are interesting and illustrative on why our customers are seeing value in our FirstTweets- as YY Lee our COO tweeted this morning allowing them to “cut through the frenzied roar to net out the actual business discussion…”.
On the day before Facebook’s IPO:
At the close of Market on the day of Facebooks IPO:
