Venture Chronicles

Ray Wang wrote a summary of CRM Evolution that I found particularly interesting, and one point in particular resonated with me because it aligns to something I have been talking about at Get Satisfaction for a while now… B2B and B2C distinctions are dead. The segmentation of business (B2B) and consumer (B2C) behaviors is a [...]

Is the freemium model compatible with traditional enterprise software? Yes but it requires a significant shift in the way you go to business as well as design and build the customer experience.

I read that RadiumOne raised more money at a valuation rumored to be $200m. I can see that. Retargeting is very popular and for good reason, it works. You have seen this in action, you go to a website and then the display ads seem to follow you in subsequent unrelated websites that you click [...]

The call to action among leading companies in recent years has been that customer service is the new marketing. This is true but it has always been true, companies as diverse as Southwest Airlines, Avis, Lexus and Johnson & Johnson have been at the forefront of the trend to use great customer service as a [...]

UPDATE: I picked up the title for this post while looking at a Twitter search result, not realizing that it was the title of Jacob Morgan’s post on the same subject… so in the interest of credit where credit is due I point you to his post on this subject. This morning I opened up [...]

I just had a great conversation with a friend that covered, among many things, email marketing and how broken it really is. Then I come home and open up my email, finding this. Email marketing is so fundamentally broken that it defies the imagination. Single digit response rates are considered a great success and not [...]

Early last year Rochester, NY based Techrigy launched SM2. Dubbed a social media monitoring service, SM2 is representative of a growing class of services that are going beyond Google Alert type filters to a comprehensive monitoring solution that aggregates content from a virtually unlimited number of network sources. As an aside, Google News Alerts has [...]

When I saw this yesterday I was a little flabbergasted, it’s almost shameful that Pepsi would pander in this manner but it’s also really risky. When you insert politics into business and take a side, you end up alienating half of your potential market. This is self-evident and Pepsi may have calculated that given the [...]

A few weeks ago I received an email from the founder of a company that makes little earbud covers, call Breppies. While it is not uncommon to get emails about products and companies, this one stood out for two reasons. First and foremost, the email from Dean Romero was thoughtful and reflected that fact that [...]

Chrysler has a blog and on it they posted a digital copy of that stupid “thank you America” ad they spent $100k of your money running. The comments on the post speak convincingly about the depth of anger felt by the vast majority, probably 98%, of people on this subject as evidenced by what they [...]