Axel Schultze

XeeMe Corp.

CEO of XeeMe, Chairman Social Media Academy, Silicon Valley entrepreneur, published author of Channel Excellence, frequent speaker at industry events, and winner of the 2008 SF Entrepreneur award. Former CEO of BlueRoads, Infinigate, Computer2000. My social presence: XeeMe.com/AxelS

Marketing Re-engineering and the new CMO

0 comments 914 reads

Posted on 2012-01-25

Social media spans the whole gamut from marketing, PR, support, product management and sales through the entire organization. Social Media became the new way for higher integration with the market. It offers marketing departments a whole new opportunity to interact with the entire organization.

CIO or CMO?

In many of the larger organizations the CIO (Chief Information Officer) is busy taking care of network infrastructure, computing power, security, ERP systems and much more. And so it is actually the CMO who is weaving the network for the market interaction model that has just expanded like the big bang over the universe of a business. In other words the new CMO will gain significantly more influence and watch the business as a whole – no longer just from a promotional perspective.

What is the new CMO up to?

She or he is re-engineering their respective marketing organization. While in the past it was mainly about advertising, events, collateral...

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How much do you stand out of the crowd?

0 comments 276 reads

Posted on 2012-01-04

Yesterday I had to search for some of my friends and for some I had the hardest time to find them and add them to a list I developed. What was the issue?

1) Your Names
If your name is Roger Brown, you may be Roger Brown on one network R Brown on another, RBrown jun and so forth. And thousands of Roger Browns have that exact same issue. But the issue is not so much about your user name but your real name. Since we all learned that the user name maybe different on each network, people search for you by your real name.
What Can You Do?
Bite the bullet and start all over. Give yourself a new name – and share it across all networks. Call yourself "Roger Brown (Roggy)" or "Roger Brown (sailer)" or something else creative and unique. Make it part of your name in your business and personal life. Tell your friends what you did and why you did it. Names were created several...

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Brain reads photo in 1 millisecond

0 comments 465 reads

Posted on 2011-12-28

Why your photo is such a big deal

There are many discussions about importance of the photo. But here is a piece of research we have done, triggered by a scientist who stated that a brain can recognize and construct the history of a picture in less than 1 Milli Second – well that’s a 100′s of a second. Read this:

We wanted to know more:

Here is what we did: We asked a few people to go through their Twitter friends as fast as they could. We used Friend Or Follow to “compose” a picture of the friends. Simply enter your Twitter name, click on friends and go. In a large computer screen you see approximately 180 small photos. Big enough to recognize a person – and small enough to get about 180 on one page.

Now give yourself 2 seconds – 21...

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Twitter, Klout, Counter Intuitive Brand Reputation Strategies

0 comments 418 reads

Posted on 2011-12-17

Only people who care stand up and argue, defend, fight or otherwise make their position very clear. Interesting enough – the more disappointing a situation gets, the louder the conversation and the bigger the impact for a brand. An age old saying goes: "The worst thing to be talked about – is not to be talked about". A few companies are actually learning from the show business how this all works.

Scandals and disappointments – strategic tools

If there is no scandal – create one. Hollywood: Whether you love your partner or not – get divorced. "Shocking the nation does more to your image than being a nice guy – being Mr.Niceguy is of no value". There are at least two companies in the social web that are leveraging and mastering that technique: Twitter and Klout. Both in their very own way.

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More social networks are coming soon

0 comments 605 reads

Posted on 2011-11-21

It appears that the software giant is game to reinvent itself and create a social media solution. While Microsoft still has the money – the question is whether or not they can change their culture from a self centric technology super shop to a community thinking global network. If Socl will ever be launched is still a question. But the billion dollar investment in technology such as Azure needs to find a consumer – and if it is just Microsoft. The 8 Billion acquisition of Skype still needs some justification. But consider a merger of 600 Million Skype users with a Socl type social network and a billion dollar hosting farm – it actually has at least a theoretic chance.

(Image by Sueddeutsche Zeitung)

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Apple never built a single phone - Smart phones will go away

1 comments 775 reads

Posted on 2011-10-27

Cell or smart phones will be the next consumer product to be obsolete.

Apple never produced any phones, but always computers. The iPhone? Is an illusion. It's a computer with an added 5% of the real estate for the phone on the CPU board. The real smart thing was to call it a phone :)

Is it just semantics?
-------------------------
Not at all - There is a critical difference: It's all about the underlying technology. Companies building "Consumer Computer" as I call it, need to have control over high performance, low power - low footprint CPUs. Apple purchased that technology for a reason ;)

There are only a few people who have the capacity to do that: Dell, Oracle (SUN's CPU production), Siemens, Samsung.... and of course Apple. Whoever wants to seriously compete with the "phone business" in general and Apple in particular needs to "think different" when it comes to "smart phones". In contrast, smart phone manufacturer like RIM or Nokia have no...

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Google Plus – Failure & Future

1 comments 1,432 reads

Posted on 2011-10-22

I started as one of the first Beta users of Google+ with great skepticism. The main reason for it was because of a) Google is not known to be a social business, b) Google is not known for having a great product marketing and c) the company is so focused on its advertising business that it maybe too difficult to create a sustainable social network arm within the company.

On July 8, I wrote my first review and in the following weeks I was surprised to see a well designed and well thought out concept of circles, a smart launch marketing initiative and a growing number of friends either joining it or asking for an invitation.

Now – 4 month later – the hype settled down and the social media reality ts catching up with Google+

The traffic analysis from Chitika may not represent the actual usage of the site but is a great reference and matches my own experience...

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LinkedIn – not really a social network anymore

0 comments 785 reads

Posted on 2011-10-06

Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, lately Google Plus have rapidly evolved over the past few years. Online interaction took center stage and having a profile is only a commodity. LinkedIn developed into a different direction. groups degraded to cheap classified add boards, question and answers were basically replaced by the likes of Quora and Focus and the actual "conversation" circles all around spam.

That doesn't mean LinkedIn is dying or going away – it only means LinkedIn is not really a social network anymore. LinkedIn was always known as a place to brush up your presence when you look for a new job and a place to scan profiles if you are hiring. For the older sales generation it is a place to lookup some people on a one by one process.

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Social Presence Management

0 comments 664 reads

Posted on 2011-09-14

When you start your social media engagement you probably start on LinkedIn or Facebook. You explore Twitter and maybe have already an account on YoutTube or Flickr. As you get connected with people you hear about Foursquare, Yelp and Google+, maybe SlideShare and Quora. Others introduce you to LinkedIn Groups or Facebook groups, maybe Focus and Plancast, Tumblr and WordPress. Over time you play with social bookmark tools such as Digg, Delicious or StumbleUpon. Then you get introduced to Klout, Posterous, PeerIndex and approximately 100 or more other tools.

Before you even started to make notes about all your profiles and accounts you have a bigger presence than you think. And now it's getting messy.

...

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Google+ what changes – a detailed review

0 comments 1,434 reads

Posted on 2011-07-07

Under the new Google Management – with Larry Page on the helm – things seem to change. Google+ is out and unlike the many products before like Wave, Buzz and others, G+ looks pretty promising.

Is it a "Facebook Killer" like several early promoters suggested? I absolutely don't think so. Is it a "Twitter Killer"? That one is much more likely. Let me share some early experience:

While the basic concept of connecting with interesting people and share information is the same, the way you connect and share is different and has some very interesting twist:

1) Connecting with people

Similar to Twitter you simply add people. Unlike Facebook or LinkedIn where each connection needs to be confirmed.

But unlike Twitter where you just "follow" whoever you want to follow, you have the option to put people into circles which you define...

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