CRM for the facebook generation - an analysis of my personal habbits

Personally I really wonder what the CRM future of companies working with and for the facebook generation will look like. We will definitely see big changes in the industry and salesforce for twitter or salesforce answers give us a little bit of a flavour what to expect and how companies will build a wider knowledge base and new communication channels based on social media on the web. However this demo flash video of faceforge as a plug in for salesforce really got me thinking...

I concider myself to be a part of the facebook generation: I am 34 years old, I work in the internet industry, I use Facebook to stay in touch with my friends, XING to manage my business contacts mainly in Germany and LinkedIn to manage my international business contacts. Both Facebook and XING are running most of the time in my browser, when I am online, which is approximately 11 hours from Monday to Friday and maybe 2-3 hours on weekend days. I check LinkedIn twice a week for new contacts, messages or news. I also use twitter, but only to stay informed about industry news. Therefore I only follow mobile or web experts or companies that build innovative software. I also tweed about 5-10 times a week about new stuff I learned, my business, my thoughts on industry trends, gadgets and tech stuff. I also use the mobile versions of all of the sites named above, when I am travelling.

Looking at this brief social media profile of myself, which is more or less shared by most of the people I know here in Berlin and that I work with, I started thinking in which social media channels I would accept corporate CRM communication. Here are the results:

1. XING - OK, since business related, but I would carefully look which personal data to share.
2. Facebook - NO!, since strictyl private.
3. Twitter - YES!, since business and knowledge oriented.
4. LinkedIn - OK, since business related, but I would carefully look which personal data to share.

Conclusion:

As an end consumer it would be ok for me to connect with a manufacturer of a product I use via Twitter in order to communicate with a support agent of that company to get help. Maybe it would also be ok, if that company would contact me later via twitter to sell me an upgrade, ad-on or other products/services. However I would not use all of the other social media sites for customer services - not yet.

As a business men the situation is different, since I do sales activities myself on XING or LinkedIn. Therefore I would accept sales or service activities from other companies that want to do business with me aswell. However I never accept any linkedIn-request or XING-contact-requests of people that I haven`t met before... private messages on these platforms are fine, but I will not share contact details so easily!

And now the most important finding in analyzing myself: I do not want ANY marketing, sales or service activities on Facebook whatsoever, since I want to use Facebook as my private friends network! And if I become a fan of a company or product, this is only because I identify myself with it and I want to share this information with my friends.

Maybe google wave will become another appropriate CRM channel like Twitter is for me personally already today:

My first test and conclusions about WolframAlpha

I was already impressed by the pre-launch screencast introducing WolframAlpha and now that it is live I did a few tests. My conclusion is that it is definitely a new way of finding accurate statistical and computational answers. WolframAlpha seems to pull very relevant data from good sources and therefore enables users to enter questions even in the form of verbal description of comparisons for different variables, which is really a unique way of getting to these infos and needed much more search efforts and time AND manual computational work to get to the same results before... However WolframAlpha is not a real substitution for google or other search engines. google will still make the world's ever growing number of websites more accessible and easier to search and Wikipedia will still provide a knowledge compendium of definitions and facts. If people learn how to use different search engines for different kind of searches and understand where certain engines have their strength, they will nicely co-exist in the future. WolframAlpha has set a new standard in computing statistical and logical data based on the descriptive input of written words and questions and is a big milestone in the race to make human knowledge and intelligence computational!

Also WolframAlpha is the perfect tool for Q&A knowledge communities like hiogi or Yahoo Clever that help other people who are traveling or who are not so familiar with online search by searching and aggregating good answers.

Here are a few of my first test searches and I am sure in a few months I will use WolframAlpha also on a day-to-day basis as I do it with google or Wikipedia today:

---------------
What is the average water consumption of a German household?
No results...
---------------
What is the deepest part of the ocean?
highest | 7235 m (4.496 mi) (Southern Ocean)
lowest | 10 924 m (6.788 mi) (Pacific Ocean)

I also found the sources really interesting and some are new to me so I am glad that I get all the combined results now from wolframalpha:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/
http://encarta.msn.com/media_461547746/The_World%27s_Oceans_and_Seas.html
http://www.iode.org/index.php?Itemid=65&id=24&option=com_content&task=view
http://www.wikipedia.org/
http://www.thew2o.net/
---------------
I really liked this one which someone twittered :-) How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?
---------------
red + green

Quellen zum Trendvortrag beim Telekom Mehrwertforum

Sehr interessante Links und Quellen, die ich genutzt habe. Mehr in den Notizen der Präsentation:

Firefox Plug-In Ubiquity:
http://ubiquity.mozilla.com/

Wolfram Alpha:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

Semantisches Web:
http://rdfs.org/sioc/spec/#sec-example

http://pingthesemanticweb.com/

http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/RDFizers

http://esw.w3.org/topic/SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData

http://sioc-project.org/

Diverses:

http://www.nextgenerationmedia.de/de/532.php

http://www.tomiahonen.com

http://metrics.admob.com/2009/01/iphone-increasing-smartphone-os-market-share/

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_20/b4131067611088.htm

Was folgt auf Web 2.0? Präsentation vom Mehrwertforum der Telekom 2009

Was folgt auf Web 2.0?

View more presentations from bbweb.

Digital milestones in my life

Yesterday night I was preparing a presentation at a big Telekom event next week in Berlin, where I will talk about what will follow Web 2.0. I really cannot hear that term anymore, but I started to think back about the digital moments in my life that really moved me...

Here they are:

1996: 1st Web-access
Boy, was I excited when I got my first internet connection to the technical university of Hamburg-Harburg to work. I could not believe that I was accually browsing on FREE newspaper pages like Bild.de or spiegel.de that I normally had to pay for as paper issues.

1997: 1st SMS sent
I loved my old Nokia 7110 and felt like Neo in the Matrix!!!

2004: 1st DSL-Flatrate
Awesome - no more monthly check of the high bills, but a fixed tariff. I loved it.

2005: 1st mobile WAP access
I must admit that I first was disappointed about the mobile offerings and still am sometimes...

2008: Got an ipod touch
Wow - what a usability. There is one life before the ipod touch / iphone and one after that....

2009: 1st free mobile VoIP-Call using Skype and a free WiFi access
A little revolution, bypassing the big telcos which needed so so long to make use of the expensive UMTS licences...

2009: 1st mobile QR / SMS airline check-in
Great to see more and more people just walk by the Lufthansa check-in ladies and hold their mobile device over one of the scanning points. New here, but a normal thing in south korea for years.

2009: I became an apple user - partially
Bought my first macbook on eBay and starting to love it more and more. My holiday movie which I cut with imovie 9.0 is incredible! Mac rocks.

I hope I will be able to conserve these precious moments and my feelings in the moment they happened for a long time, which is why I am writing them down here. Probably my grandchildren will just yawn about it. :-)

Digital arts presented and sold in a cool way

Check out this website, which offers some really unique peaces of digital art. Digitalbloom runs an interesting approach with pre-selected artistics that match strict quality criteria. You can download and use the digital art for your screens, displays, events, etc... Hey - not only Bill Gates should be able to afford to change the digital decoration in his house with good digital paintings or other art ... ;-)

Impressions from the mobile world congress in Barcelona 2009

nice weather and good athosphere:















I am the biggest paella fan:















and not only me I guess:





























































The luxurous pissoir in the t-mobile tent. Standing there and watching T-Mobile ads was really fascinating :-)



















hmm - ok. I see. Yip. Ok... What?














Steve Ballmer giving his speach:
















Olli from Nokia:

What i recently learned about the mobile world

"G" - I have not blogged in such a long time. hiogi is keeping me extremely busy and we are looking at such exciting times ahead of us... anyway... over the last months I visited several conferences, I had quite a few podium discussions and I just found all my notes in my notebook bag. Time to share some of the stuff i learned or picked up:

a) 2011 the revenue split of mobile advertising will be as follows (according to Strategy Analysts July 2008):

• 55% Display
• 27% Search
• 9% SMS / MMS
• 7% Others
• 2% TV / Video

Nothing really new and as expected, but definetely interesting for all those mobile start-ups currently calculating their break-even. ;-)

b) Carwash notifications of tz-München (6573 participants via SMS - Alert: Which station has the special today...), Marathon Ticker of the Hamburger Abendblatts (4000 participants- Alert: Who is running where?), picture quiz ofAachen Münchner Zeitung (What are you seeing in this picture?) were the winners of the MINDS-Awards in Hamburg this year and quite interesting SMS sevices for newspaper readers.

c) iPhone showed it, Android is doing it and also the new web 'n' walk will have an open platform for third party applications (named widgets :-) across various operating systems. Another great chance for developers in my opinion. Fast movers can win big time.

d) Today I learned from the really clever guys of www.vioso.com that some projectors are already as small as a box of matches... Oh yes, I cannot wait until I put my beamer into my jeans pocket, upload a ppt to my mobile and off I go to a customer presentation. Yeeehahh. Also check out their projection software that enables you to project on any surface, in any angle, in any size... cool stuff. I will try it during my next presentations for sure...

e) iPhone for me? I had sleepless nights about that questions. I am extremely satisfied with my ipod touch. It has been working perfectly as a gadget for me over the last couple of months. However as a phone, I will probably soon swith from my Sony Ericsson K800i to a Nokia E71 or something similar. I simply want a device in my pocket that easily connects to my car, is easy to type on, works as a modem with my Lenovo Thinkpad, takes good pictures... all the other fun stuff I will keep doing on my beloved ipod touch. Peace.

f) to be continued. It's late and i just remembered some other stuff that i need to finish up today. c u

Das digitale Zeitalter scheint noch fern

In einem Selbstversuch habe ich die letzten Monate mal alle Briefe, die von Außen her unwichtig erschienen konsequent in eine Ikea-Box wegsortiert. Soeben bin ich alle Briefe durchgegangen, habe sie aufgerissen und siehe da... ich lag zu 90% richtig. Ok, die ein oder andere Rechnung habe ich auch fälschlicherweise wegsortiert aber dafür gibt es ja Mahnschreiben... Mein Fazit: Es wird viel zu viel Werbung und noch viel zu viel unnütze Korrespondenz per Post verschickt. Das digitale Zeitalter scheint noch in sehr ferner Zukunft zu liegen. Die Schlimmsten unter den Briefkastenverschmutzern sind dabei die Deutsche Post selber, DHL, der ADAC, ils (was auch immer das für eine komische Firma sein mag...), Banken wie Comdirect oder Deutsche Bank (zu deren Kunden ich dann wohl gehöre), Kabel Deutschland, Wormland, diverse Versicherungen und und und... Den wenigsten der Firmen habe ich bewußt mal meine Adresse gegeben oder zugestimmt, dass ich Werbung erhalten möchte. Sie kommt trotzdem. Stop the paper spam! Please! So, dann werde ich den ganzen Kram mal durch den Schredder jagen und zum Altpapier bringen. Gute Nacht.

Swype - a new way of typing on mobile phones

Pretty cool stuff. I would love to type on my ipod touch and iphone like this:

Free Webcam Chat at Ustream

Früher haben Delphine noch Seeleute gerettet...

Gedankenbrei: Damals - vor hunderten von Jahren, als die Meere noch sauber waren und noch keine Motorboote über die Wellen peitschten, haben Delphine wohl noch Schiffbrüchige gerettet und diese zum nächsten Ufer gezogen. So erzählt man sich zumindest in alten Sagen und Seemannsgeschichten... Neulich erzählt mir dagegen ein Bekannter von einem Urlaubserlebnis aus Australien. Dort wurde Dolphine-Swimming als Touristenattraktion angeboten. Dutzende von Motorbooten fahren täglich hinaus zu den Delphinschulen und die Touris dürfen ins Wasser springen. Eine Einheimische, die dieses Ritual wohl wöchentlich zelebrierte, soll dabei wohl mal ertrunken sein, so die Geschichte meines Bekannten. Sie schnorchelte und tauchte regelmäßig mit den Delphinen und soll diese wohl auch mal provoziert haben... so lange bis ein Delphin mit ihr "zu spielen" begann und sie von oben immer wieder nach unten stuppste.... bis sie ertrank. Hmm - Delphine sind nicht doof und vielleicht ist das traurige Schicksal dieser Frau aus down under ja ein Wink mit dem Zaunpfahl!? Just a stupid thought while standing in the shower... ;-)

Icke uff dem Blog von FREUNDIN über IPTV :-)

Hehe - ist zwar schon eine Weile her aber das Thema IPTV finde ich weiterhin extrem spannend. Wird ja nur noch ein paar Jahre brauchen, bis wir alle zentral unseren Medienkonsum aus einem "Homeserver" im Wohnzimmer beziehen - egal ob dieser eine PS3, eine Settop-Box, PC oder Wii ist... Letztendlich werden in sicherlich weniger als 5 Jahren sich alle unsere Geräte per Bluetooth z.B. ansteuern lassen und automatisch synchronisieren bzw. ggf. werden Musik- oder Fotodaten beispielsweise gar nicht mehr auf eigenen Festplatten gespeichert, sondern von privaten virtuellen Speichern der ISPs geladen... lineares Fernsehen wird ab 2015 spätestens sowieso der Vergangenheit angehören. Load-on-demand wird viel praktischer sein. sitzt man in der U-Bahn auf dem Weg nach Hause gibt man im Handy in der Zukunft einfach ein, was einen zu Hause erwarten soll. 10 Minuten später wenn man die Haustür öffnet, ist dann das Licht an, die Stereoanlage spielt den neuen Lieblingssong von itunes und auf der Festplatte wartet der neueste HD-Filmstreifen, der nach einem kurzen Gang zum LCD-Message-Zentrum am Kühlschrank an die nächste Wand gebeamt wird.

Hier der Link zu dem Freundin-Artikel / Medientagen: http://blog.freundin.de/blog/unter_freundinnen/general/2006/10/17/ebay_fur_die_glotze

cool stuff - text documents shared in a community

Hey, did you know that there is a youtube-kinda platform for documents? http://www.scribd.com/ cool stuff...

The gap between the offline and wireless worlds is getting smaller

If you wander through the streets or if you go shopping, have you ever felt you would like to check a comparable offering on the internet? Probably most of us have not so far. But with new wireless devices and cheaper data packages it soon will be totally normal to compare and check stuff on your mobile. Let me give you an example: You probably have seen those pieces of papers that get attached to the inner windows of cars saying:"For sale for only $1290", right? In case you really needed a new car at that moment, you possibly stopped and wrote down the telephone number, right? Then you would call the person, and asked for some details, test drive, etc... But wouldn´t it be great, if you had all the details about the car written down somewhere or even better in a digital way? Wouldn´t it be great to directly compare the offering with other cars? Wouldn´t it be great to do the transaction on a secure internet platform? Well eat this: A young company from Switzerland has launched a cool wireless feature for eBay listings that spits out a 2D- graphical and branded code that the seller could stick on his car or any other item. All the buyer would have to do is get the small Java client via SMS and take a picture of the code. The buyer then gets directly transfered to the eBay WAP listing of the car and he could bookmark the car in order to compare it later to other car offerings on the internet. Check out: http://ebay.beetagg.com!

Of course this idea is not brand new, since there are already things like "text to buy" in the USA, supported by Paypal, but the market is just starting up. Believe me. In about 12 months from now we will see many posters and advertisements in the streets that include some kind of wireless link! Wanna bet?

23 Mio Nonliner in Deutschland

Von diesen 23 Mio sollen laut der Initiative D21 rund 78% über 50 Jahre alt sein. Wow - das ist ein interessantes Marktsegment! Enkel und Kinder tut Euch zusammen und lehrt die Großeltern und Eltern das Internet! Auch für Softwareentwickler ein interessantes Marktsegment, sofern sich beweisen ließe, dass es so etwa wie "elderly-optimized software ergonomics" oder "Software, designed für Senioren" gibt...

IPTV - when will your living room become a media centre?

This x-mas season will be very exciting for everyone who has been watching the development of the Microsoft Media Center Edition in the recent years. I am pretty sure that MCE-enabled settop boxes or PC-TV-connectors will be the new killer devices in the living room - the question is when will they be affortable and when will the market momentum increase? Will it already be this x-mas-season? What do you think?

Feel free to discuss this with me right here or on the Medientage in Munic:
http://www.medientage.de/medienkongress/programm_detail.php?panelnr=386&Schienen_Nr=7&Datum_Nr=2

I will definitely watch the relevant eBay category and the currently one and only tool for eBay "mceAuctions": http://www.scendix.de/mceauction/index.php over the next months...

Internet - job engine or job killer!?

Yesterday I drove my car home from work and I remembered that I still had a birthday gift certificate in my glove department for the second part of a kite-boarding course, which I started last year, but then the wind died. While driving I pulled out the certificate and looked at it. Besides the organizational stuff it had this URL on it: http://www.kiteboardingfehmarn.de/. I remembered that the course was all the way up north on the island of Fehmarn in a tiny little city called Gold, with about three houses. Then I thought: How did small companies like this surf school get clients before we got the internet in 1995? That is only 11 years ago and I can barely remember... Ok we possibly pulled out the thick yellow pages book and started looking. But most of the time this only included business in the region you lived in. You possibly had a chance to find a business far a way by calling some local tourist information... then my thoughts began to race... Is the internet a chance for small local businesses that are located near some big metropolitan areas? Is the internet or the digialization maybe not a job killer, but a job engine? I do not have the necessary macroeconomic and demographic data at hand to answer the question, but here are some pros and cons as food for thought:

Job Killer Examples:

1. Travel industry: local travel agents will soon be disappeared and will be replaced by travelsites
2. Bank industry: I haven´t seen my bank office in about 3 years, since I do internet banking
3. Flight Check-In: Most of the time I check in at a machine or via the phone
4. Public Tax administration: I did my last tax statement completely via the PC and handed it in via the internet (ELSTER), a great productivity increase this must be for the tax experts, but also a possible job killer

Job Engine Examples:

1. Software industry: thousands of jobs have been created around webdesign, e-commerce systems, business software, intranets, CRM, Supply Chain Management...
2. Online Retailers: In Germany around 60.000 people live off eBay, either by being Sellers themselves or by working for a company that makes money from services or software around eBay.
3. SMEs: Many small and medium-sized businesses that found out how to do online-marketing have a much greater visibility today and found new customers that not only drive longer ways to visit the store, but that also order online, e.g. specialized Spanish fancy food stores, surf schools, small hotels, restaurants, hiking equipment sellers, surfboard sellers, translation services...
4. Gaming, fun and services industry: many new jobs have been created thanks to the new medium, which were not possible in the old days, e.g. Online-Games, online picture processing, home office workers, flirt- and chat platforms...

In the end you can make up your mind yourself or start looking for university studies and public statistics on www.metager.de to find out the truth.

I finally arrived at home and felt deeply sorry for the thousands of people who might have lost their job, because of too much competition from the internet or from overwhelming robot productivity, but on the other hand I was hoping that many of them were able to retrain themselves with new PC- and software skills to find new jobs and I was very optimistic about the digital times ahead, since it bears great chances even for the smallest local OTC companies, but we definitely need more students with programming skills to help all the business get connected.

Smartphones in 2009 - big changes ahead...

In 2009 according to new studies every third phone in Germany will be a smarphone! How will our life have changed by then?

• Will we still carry three+ devices like ipods, digital camera and mobile phone? Nope, it´s all in one!
• Will we only synchronize private emails at home in front of the PC? Nope, everywhere, anytime!
• Will we be able to write & edit word documents including drag&drop functionality on the phone? Yip!
• Will we watch television in the subway on our phone? Yip!
• Will we connect to WLAN hotspots all over the city? Yip!
• Will we be worried about costly dataplans, WAP or UMTS rates? Nope, because we will have a flatrate!
• Will we use Skype on the mobile phone to chat? Yip!
• Will bandwidth increase and will telcos stop limiting data traffic? I hope so...

Hey, but in the end my fingers are still too big and it is annoying to type on a mobile phone and you know what? The screen still will be small compared to ever increasing flatscreens at home... We will see... What do you think?

Go out and listen - learn from the kids!

Watching my uncle or dad or even some executive deal with new media and devices like mobile phones, DVD players, computers and PDAs I sometimes think: "Hey Bjoern, when are you gonna get slow? Are you already slow in using these things?" I don´t think so, but any kid on the street could already beat me in any Sony Playstation, Nintendo or xbox game - for sure. And they would probably be able to tell me the newest technical features these things have... Just to stay up to speed I bought a PSP a couple of months ago... ;-) They would also know which websites are being used by the new generation of internet junkies. The other day after a presentation in front of an MBA class in Switzerland, I talked to the professor... He told me that his two boys where getting to the age where they are ready to move out and he was already afraid of that, since he would lose his best informants.... His two sons were his best source to stay in touch with what the gaming market, collaboration websites or internet meeting places like myspace offer today to the 14 to 20 year olds. They are the IT Managers and developers of tomorrow and things are moving fast. So all you IT Managers out there: Go out and listen - learn from the kids!

How transparent can we get?

Sometimes I wonder on how many website I already registered? How many passwords did I use? Do I remember them all?
What kind of information did I leave in some of the databases?
My Name? Sure...
My adress? Most of the time...
My email? Yip...
Creditcard numbers? Yes, often...
Telephone number? not always...
Is this being publicized? Nope, not really, except maybe on OpenBC.
What else is being tracked and recorded? Stored away for history? My emails? Certainly all webpages and much more? Do I really want to see others where I am registered, to let them know they can trust me? Hmmm...

Do I think it is critical that we leave so many personal data out there? Well on the one hand I do and on the other I don´t. Sure all this data is in the hand of some administrator/company and I certainly hope that they use the latest security mechanism to ensure that my data is safe and that no hacker can steel them... but we definitely get much more vulnarable to attacks, stolen data, credit card no theft, account hijacking etc. This is why I think it is critical and we need more policies and web standards to secure personal data. Also I think more restrictions are needed in terms of spyware functionality that tracks our behaviour on the desktop e.g. and sends it out to some information gathering companies. Also the mass of internet data and personal information could be a thread for individuals in the future, because based on their personal online behaviours and interests, coupled with geographic, demographic, biometric (new passports) and possibly in the future genetic information they could be discrimated by third parties, insurance companies, etc. and we are once again headed to a world where people do not get equal chances... This really will become a challenge for the UN, W3C, ICANN and all the governing bodies worldwide!

On the other hand the internet, digital data and tracking mechanisms offer great chances for intelligent agencies, the policies and the military in order to track down cross passers, terrorists and criminals. Hopefully the good guys will win this race of intelligence.

I really do not worry at the moment that I could get to transparent and that is of course because I have nothing to hide. BUT, has this thread affected my daily life? YES: I do check my credit card balances more often than in the past, which means more stress....I switch my passwords and PINS regularely, which gets confusing sometimes and I therefore have to call these darn hotlines more often to reset them... I also think more about what to install on my computer and what the software sends out into the internet nirvana to someone else, which means that I spend more time configuring my firewall, blocking almost any outgoing traffic, which means that sometimes my software is outdated... Hey, have you ever send one of these microsoft bug reports? Hmm, I certainly haven´t? Have you installed a complex desktop search and management software? I did not so far, because, do you know what it tracks and sends out?

Well, what I am really trying to say is that the digital age already means more stress, more dangers and challenges, but it is also so FASCINATING and I guess we have to keep the child in us in order to trust each other, to try new things out and to be able to innovate!