Sameer Patel

Savos Group

Sameer Patel is a founding partner at the Sovos Group, a consulting firm that helps leading organizations accelerate employee, customer and partner performance via the strategic use of social and collaborative approaches and technology. Sameer blogs at Pretzel Logic and is @sameerpatel on Twitter

Social Business Facts and Fiction

0 comments 9,049 reads

Posted on 2012-02-28

The hubris around Social Business is scaling new heights these days, and yet in many ways the concept seems to be redlining to nowhere. As an example, take a look at this thread on Google Plus by Francine Hardaway. 133 comments later, there’s little agreement on what all of this really is, who the experts are, what it entails and who the buyer is. Foundational elements of anything that you would characterize as a market. With marketers, PR leaders and collaboration specialists racing to lay claim to the movement from their own comfort zone / vantage point, I can only imagine executives getting very confused about what exactly all of this means to their business and if the needed upheaval is even warranted.

In the context of internal collaboration specifically, this report from...

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IBM Lotusphere 2012: The Old Lotus Has Wilted

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Posted on 2012-01-26

+1 for Social Business. IBM is in. Whole hog.

6000+ faithful Lotus attendees and 100s of Lotus Partners got fed IBM’s ebusiness equivalent play for the 21st century. Simply put, that they are betting their entire portfolio of collaboration solutions, both old and new on Social Business.

One fat caveat before I put my thoughts here. Connections Next, IBM’s enterprise social software offering that was the star of its presentation won’t be here until later this summer. But given the play it got at Lotusphere 2012 and IBMConnect, it’s too large a bet on IBM’s Collaboration portfolio to not consider seriously.

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That Steaming Pile of Social

2 comments 2,344 reads

Posted on 2010-10-26

There’s been constructive commentary of late with respect to missteps with CRM and how the pain gets amplified when you consider the coming data tsunami from social media. I’ve also lamented about the coming migraine. So have others.

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Enterprise 2.0 Enables New Engagement Layer: Inside Scoop with Sameer Patel

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Posted on 2010-07-20

Bob Thompson interviews Sameer Patel, a thought leader in social/collaborative strategy and execution, about the state of Enterprise 2.0.

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Why Customer Acquisition Stinks

1 comments 2,558 reads

Posted on 2010-05-10

It’s fascinating how we consider New Product Development /Research to be investments (by implication, a return can be had on these) on one hand, but we allocate marketing and customer acquisition as an expense. In plain English that translates to: We’re ok with considering what we design, build and sell, an asset that will yield returns. But not the effort it takes to serve prospects and customers that may be interested in what we purvey. Baffling, no?

Marketing has this almost comical, inverted model of inputs and outputs that defies Economics 101. A business typically buys inputs at wholesale and sells products at higher margin retail thereby seeking to make a profit. In contrast, marketing uses big picture estimates such as ‘customer lifetime value’ to estimate how much you can make from the average customer (output). But excluding branding, cost inputs to acquire prospects and sell more...

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