"Some corporations will attempt to maximize the business value of each individual worker, stripping out all the extraneous human factors. Chinese walls will be erected to keep the outside from the inside, the personal from the business, and the public from the private. But when you put messaging and communications tools into the hands of people they will find ways to talk to each other— about work, life, play, the project, and the joke they just heard at the water cooler." - Cliff Gerrish

The line above is from a brilliant post by Cliff Gerrish, touching on CRM, VRM and the rise of tools like Google Buzz and Salesforce.com's Chatter. 

Read the whole thing here.

Is "fatal flaw" too strong a term?  Maybe.  Then again, maybe not.

First off, what is Google Buzz?  It's Google's new shot-across-the-bow to Facebook and Twitter, an attempt to integrate real-time web interactions with the well-known and widely-used Gmail interface.

However, Buzz does two things that will simply make it unusable.

1. It shows threaded conversations and strongly highlights the initiator of those conversations, and makes the comments subservient to the initial post.
2. It takes posts that have "new" comments and immediately bumps those posts to the topmost position of the viewing window.

This interface will greatly reinforce the existing power law relationships online, and have the effect of greatly reducing the serendipity and interestingness in things like the current Twitter and Facebook interfaces. 

With Buzz, those who (a) have a large number of followers, and (b) post frequently will always bubble up to the top of the stack, crowding out everything else.  Currently, I'm following about 200 people, which (you would think) would give me a great diversity in my stream.  However, the top twenty one spots of my Buzz feed are held by:

Just tripped across a great turn of phrase from Peppers and Rogers: "Transaction Myopia."  Good stuff, and worth checking out. (Via CRMAdvocate)

The key bit:

"It's far easier for almost any business manager to think in terms of transactions completed-whether you talk about products sold, or calls handled, or loyalty points awarded-than it is to think in terms of asset values improved (i.e., lifetime values increased because of strengthened relationships). And obviously, having better transactional data will help any firm do a better job in making customer-centric decisions. But even sophisticated statistical analysis will not necessarily change the mind-set of the executives involved. 

Read more »

Morgan Stanley's uber-analyst Mary Meeker recently published her 671(!) page report on the state (and future) of the mobile internet.  Of her eight "key themes" in the report, one really stood out:

Mobile is Ramping Faster Than Desktop Internet Did and Will Be Bigger Than Most Think - a confluence of five factors (3G + Social Networking + Video + VoIP + Impressive Mobile Devices) Are Driving This Change

Whoa.  Think about that for a second.  Mobile Internet usage is ramping even faster than Desktop usage did between the early 90s and today.  As soon as 2012, smartphones are predicted to outship worldwide PC shipments.

So what does this mean to the customer conversation?  Two things:

• You need to be thinking now about how you reach customers via the mobile channel
• More importantly, you need to be thinking now (or, perhaps even last week) about how customers reach you via the mobile channel

You think I'd learn.

I'd been scheduled to go on an embark aboard the USS Stennis this week, on a trip similar to this one taken by Guy Kawasaki and others.  (Thank you, again, USNavy for the invitation, and Andy Sernovitz for facilitating.)  However, the storms hammering the West Coast changed the plans, and the embark was cancelled.  No problem, these things happen.  Totally understand.

I'd split my flights so the outbound to San Diego was on American Airlines, and the return was on Southwest in order to get the best fare.  When I found out the trip was canceled, I pulled up the two respective emails to try to see what could be salvaged from the trips.  Here's what happened.

Southwest:

Social media, or perhaps we should call it "social business," is a sea change that will affect every aspect of the organization. Nowhere is this more evident than at the intersection between an organization and its customers. Customers, once solely at the "receiving" end of corporate communications, are now not only entering conversations with organizations but are, more importantly, increasingly entering into online conversations with each other around products and brands.

In this article, we will address:

• What is social media?
• How is "social media" morphing into "social business?"

• What are the ROI and other metrics organizations should be putting in place to address social business activities?
• How does an organization get started?

What is social media?

In both professional and personal life, human beings naturally form groups based on affinities and expertise. We gravitate to others with whom we share interests. Most of us belong to real world networks that formed organically. Not surprisingly, these networks rapidly migrated to the online world.

These four components—profiles, connections, content and activities—form the pillars of what makes a social site "social."

AT SUPERNOVA 2009, Chris Anderson (Wired, @chr1sa) "beta tested" his newest thesis: "Atoms are the New Bits." Here is the presentation:

On the subject of frequent flier miles, Gary says:

"Miles are evil. They create apathy on the end of the service provider."

"Have decades of frequent flyer programs instilled institutional apathy on the part of customer facing employees? Perhaps we are talking about apathetic DNA across entire corporations or even within the entire airline industry. If one believes customers won't leave even when treated poorly, where is the incentive to 'step it up?'"

Back in the late 1990's, I was flying weekly between Chicago and Palo Alto. 1,846 miles out on Monday, 1,846 miles back on Friday, week in, week out.  I racked up hundreds of thousands of miles, was "1K" on United, got an upgrade every flight, and was willing to put up with a lot of their crap. 

Had a blast chatting with danah boyd this morning on this week's SupernovaHub Network Age Briefing (disclosure: Supernova is a client).  The link above is to a rebroadcast of the call, which ran about an hour and covered "Class and Connection in the Network Age."  We also had some great conversation with @nwjerseyliz and @evanwolf the others who joined live in the conversation.

One of the big "a ha" moments in talking to danah was the fact that, as has been noted in many other places, we typically hang out (more-or-less) with "people like us" online, as well as offline.  However, Twitter's "Trending Topics" are a bridge to the other neighborhoods, a bridge to the "not-like-me."

Example:

Social networking was big in 2006. Really big. Really, really big. MySpace has more than 50 million members. Google bought YouTube, a video-sharing site with a heavy social component, for $1.65 billion. Facebook, a social networking site for college students, is rumored to be courting buyers with a price tag in the billions as well. However, most of the social networking action in 2006 was in the consumer space. I predict 2007 will be the year when social network becomes a critical part of the business landscape. Customer-facing executives—and CSOs and CMOs in particular—need to be aware of this fundamental shift that is on the horizon if they want their companies to succeed in the wake of this transition.

Deceptively simple, online social networks contain great power. They change the online space from one of static web pages and stale marketing messages to a live, vibrant network of connected individuals who share their abilities, expertise and interests.