Creating analog content in the past
When people take pictures they shoot a series of them in order to pick out the best afterwards.
When people used analog cameras to take pictures they took the time to think about the picture, the positioning, the layout, the content, the expression, the lightning.
The entire composition was well-thought out as every image made was real out of the pocket money due to the high cost of the film and the development cost.

This slow creation process has been lost in this digital world.

Analog content is shooting pictures with a photo camera or movies on photographic film, writing on a type writer and speaking a text into a tape recorder.
The carrier of the content can be paper, film, wax disk, canvas, stone, …all unalterable and relatively expensive.

Digital content is all content that is being produced and generated using digital media which can be erased or altered easily.

Analog craftsmanship vs digital fast food
When creating analog content you have to plan, prepare and know exactly what you will be doing next as any creation results in real out of the pocket money: the carrier of the content and the time invested.
Changing analog content requires to redo the entire scene or page as the content in most cases is not erasable (except tape recorder) or modifiable.
This requires craftsmanship and a thinking process.

When creating digital content you work mainly using trial and error (erase).
Or even with post-modification using a tool like Photoshop or the backspace on your keyboard.
You don’t care so much about planning, thinking and organizing but point and shoot: like fast food.
After the content creation process the good content is selected from the all the content created and digitally improved.

Note: We have altered this text several times before publishing, but is this the best we could create?

Due to the fact the creator of analog content needs to plan, prepare, think over and use all his expertise before and during the creation it is likely the content will have higher value than digital. The brains of the creator have been processing the content several times before the physical creation.

Digital content creation is more like having a series of trials and select the best results or what approaches the most what you intended to achieve or present.

Could it be possible that due to the lacking long preparation and thinking process the better content is with analog content instead of digital ?

What do you think what generates the best content: analog of digital media?

Due to the high cost involved using and processing analog media we will stick to digital media even we are convinced analog content would be better

The music industry died due to digital

The music industry almost died due to not adapting and adopting the change imposed by digital technology.

During the nineties home computers were capable of producing quality music and after 2000 the Internet gave people the channel to distribute music at a low cost.

The newspaper missed the Internet

The newspaper industry is dying due to all the blogging and the available free content – even in real-time – on the Internet.

The Internet gave people the possibility to blog and micro-blog creating quality or specific content. The Internet is both production apparatus and the distribution channel.

TV broadcasting industry could be the next prey

The next industry is probably the TV broadcasting as more and more people are switching over to streaming video content from YouTube, Vimeo and others. For the consumers is has the advantage of on-demand content instead of sequential content to wait for.
Additionally the TV industry model is nearly completely dependent from advertising which can flip over to any other medium almost instantly.

The movie industry is an experienced survivor

The movie industry is already a survivor as it survived the TV competition during almost 50 years.
The movie industry is doing its’ utmost by proposing 3D movies that give audiences a new experience (with the hurdle of the goggles).
3D movies make it harder to download over the Internet due to the larger volume of data and the difficulty of creating the same experience in the living-room. Even though 3D TV sets are coming to your home soon too.

In the movie industry a phenomenon like Paranormal Activity has shown the production apparatus can be owned by anybody due to the low cost of equipment (<$1,000) and making a low budget movie ($15,000)
Still Oren Peli needed the marketing power and the money of Paramount Pictures for the marketing and distribution of the movie.
It is clear the movie industry still has some time to keep on going and they have a plan: 3D that seems successful.

The Internet changes industries: your industry too

Each of these industries (except the Movie industry) have collapsed or are collapsing due to the change in the ownership of the production apparatus and the distribution channel: from a controlled environment to the open market of the Internet where anyone can compete.

Many services and systems will be replaced by online systems using the Internet as the channel for both access and distribution.
The Internet will cause disruptions in many industries.
Your industry too can become under threat one day.

Maybe your production process will not be under threat, but the distribution, the marketing, the sales process, the customer service or the administration will be.
Your competitors could just take advantage of the Internet in one way or another, making your company old fashioned and obsolete.

Marketing can delay the threat

Marketing is best placed to use messaging for delaying the digital disruption by:
- Claiming quality compared to the Internet offerings
- Personal service instead of an automated service
- Appropriate or suiting products or services instead of generic solutions
- Creating fear: fear of the unknown, fear of lacking security, fear of less quality

Fear will probably have the biggest effect and last the longest as it relies on subjectiveness and is in most cases intangible.

Although marketing can delay the threat, eventually marketing will not be able to circumvent it as the Internet will also step into your industry and impose changes.

How big are the digital challenges for your industry ?

The tale of a market leader encountering open standards

This is a tale of a market leader who since many years made good sales and profit in a market niche using proprietary technology.
Management believed they were the ‘Masters of the Universe’ having high margins and ever growing sales volumes.

As the news of the ever increasing profits spread and the growth of the market had become evident as it was no longer a niche market, more companies became interested to become a supplier for this expanding market.

Due to the fact only proprietary solutions were available to the market, an industry organization or a competitor gathered a several vendors in order to define open standards.
As one of the market leaders the company was invited to participate, however management decided not to participate as the standardization didn’t seem to bring any immediate benefit but was considered as a waste of time. Management estimated it was certainly no threat for business of the company.
They considered themselves as the people with vision who had spotted the market long before (in reality it was probably just a lucky shot).

Slowly the open standards gained field as more vendors adopted them. Even the company enabled the open standard on some of its’ products in order to be able to present it to their customers but without the intention selling it.

Over time the open standard matured, got more features and gained field in the market. It became a real competition to the products or solutions of the company.
Customers preferred the having the freedom of choice and switching of vendors at almost no cost.

Open standards vs legacy technology

Once a technology is available as open standard the barrier to enter the market is lowered significantly as almost any vendor in the world can propose the solution (even Chinese manufacturers).

The sole differentiators that your company still can use for selling the legacy technology based products are:
- The installed base: all the references acquired since many years
- The quality of products and services
- The presence in local markets (if this has been achieved)

It will become hard to explain the premium price to be paid for the legacy technology as the open standards can rely upon components available on a large scale at a lower price and hardly any investment on development to be depreciated.

Proprietary or legacy technology is only possible in emerging or niche markets as innovation still counts.
Once a market grows and becomes significant in size, open standards are introduced, then you have the choice:
- Embrace open standards
- Look for a different market or a different solution as prices and margins will only decrease.
Your competitors will be lean and mean as they never had big margins on these products.

Do you sell solutions based on proprietary technology or open standards?

In the software industry before releasing a product commercially to the market the solution is to be given to so-called beta customers.
The idea is that these companies or users will test the software thoroughly in real life situations experiencing real life events in the hope to debug the application as much as possible and to test have real life strain tests.

Reasons for becoming a Beta user
Why should people or companies sign-up for the Beta?
- They have the opportunity to influence the development of the solution
- They can have a solution at no cost

Beta vs future customers
- Are the suggestions made by the Beta users the same level of importance for your future real customers ?
- Could using Beta users drive and change your solution surpassing the original goals set as these Beta customers are far more technically advanced than the potential customers of the marker you are targeting ?
- Is the Beta customer representative for your future paying customers ?
- Will Beta customers eventually become paying customers ?

It is the myth of Beta customer.

Finding beta customers
In reality finding and having signing-up user as Beta is not that simple. It requires a complete marketing campaign to generate interest and having people to take the risk.
Getting the Beta customers to sign-up is not that easy.
Especially with business applications, as these companies need to take the risk:
- For the benefit of having a free solution
- Having to stumble on all the possible problems and errors
- Interrupting the normal activity due to these bugs
- Reporting the required feedback to the vendor
Whereas the main rule for companies is risk-avoidance.

The myth of the Beta company customer is even bigger.

Currently we have the Beta for popupbooster:
- Providing relevant content to your visitors in real-time.
- Dynamic web pages: less bounces
- Matching landing pages: keep their attention
- Decrease cart abandonment: more sales
- Exit stopper: win their interest or gain awareness
- Conditional conversation starter using popular web services
You can sign-up a Beta user here – If you want.

Most of your customers or leads will have a voice mail system in place to be used in case when they are away from their desk.

Voice mails are hard to do

Typically when speaking into a voice mail system, people:
- Constructing the strangest sentences
- Telling the wrong things or things that not really matter
- Missing to tell the real point
- Being very brief missing essential parts of the reasons for your call
- Speaking too long (over 2 minutes)
- Using the wrong wordings
- Speaking with the wrong intonation
These problems are probably due to the fact that there is no human response from the receiving party at it is a recorder.
Of course you can always use the delete option and re-record until you get bored or more nervous.

The receiver will listen to a voice mail differently than during a normal telephone conversation. This adds on to the difficulty of a voice mail. Also the receiver can replay your (weird sounding) message several times allowing analyzing your strange behavior on the voice mail system. This will not add on to your credibility.

The end result is that the important message that needed to be communicated can:
- Leave the wrong impression
- Be misinterpreted
Both having with the result of creating the wrong response or action.
Still you can use an email as back-up referring to your voice mail just to be sure that the message is communicated.

A voice mail gone wrong in the British comedy TV show “Coupling“:

Voice mails in the sales process

During a sales process, if you need to bring an important message or information to your customer or lead, will you then leave a voicemail? Or try to call back later?

What harms the most?
- Using the voice mail in order to leave the message: that can be misinterpreted or not listened.
- Disconnecting and try to call back a little later?

Calling back later will require more time from you and you can fail to speak your prospect or customer again.

There is a trade off:
- Using the voice mail system: a wrong interpretation will be hard to repair.
- Not bringing the message on time has a certain cost too as a decision can depend on it.
But which one is the costliest?

There are the additional problems of:
- The many voice mails are never returned which stops your conversation.
- The facts changing or events happening after leaving the voice mail.
The best is of course if you could speak the person personally.
An alternative is to send an email, but maybe that’s not suitable for your all-important message.

How effective are you in leaving voice mails?
Did leaving a voice mail ever helped the sales process?

Google is B2B

Google (GOOG) is and has always been in the business of selling services into the business market by providing an online platform for advertising for businesses based upon their search engine system. The operations of Google use a distributed massive computing platform throughout the world. Thus thanks to the B2B business Google has:
- Company names
- Contact details
- Online ad spending indication by company
- Experience in web services.

Amazon is B2C

Amazon (AMZN) started out as an online bookshop and expanded the business by offering more consumer goods.
Due to the consumer business (B2C) Amazon has:
- Contact details of individuals – thus no relation to companies
- Experience for web services mainly as web shop.

Google gets lost in Streetview

The almighty Google
- Is and was the leading computing platform.
- Was well positioned to offer other services for businesses.
Especially compared to a B2C company like Amazon.
Still Google decided to ignore their business customers and started to focus on services related to consumers. The advertising business model of Google made them decide to start initiatives like Google Maps, Google Streetview. The latter requiring huge amounts of storage space. Many of them services with doubtful, yet-to-be-proven or non-existent business model.

At the same time Amazon started their S3 (Simple Service Storage) right into the business market and challenging the computing technology of Google.
As this wasn’t enough, Amazon launched also their EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) virtualization platform to complete the offering.

Overnight Amazon defined and conquered the market with affordable pay-as-you-go pricing system. Exactly where one would have expected Google.

As Google had busy with other initiatives like Android (mobile operating system), Streetview, … they responded rather late with their Google App Engine offering. The App Engine offering is much more limited than the Amzon offerings: not only by the languages supported but also for porting existing systems and more flexible.
For further comparison:
- Markus Clems – Cloudy Times
- ZDNet Dion Hinchcliffe – Platform-as-a-Service
- GridGain – Open Cloud Platform

Amazon the bookstore conquers the computing cloud market

The start-up companies were the first to embrace the offering of Amazon Web Services, soon followed by larger enterprises.
Even IBM embraced Amazon Web Services for:
- Delivering IBM’s market leading software to clients and developers.
- Running IBM software (already-purchased by IBM clients) on Amazon EC2.

While Google was shooting pictures of the streets of the world, Amazon took market leadership in the cloud market for SaaS applications and web services.

The company management of Google failed to recognize and to catch a market where they should have become market leader as they had:
- The technology platform
- The technology experience
- The operational experience of running large computer centres
- The B2B market relations
- The B2B marketing experience
- The market esteem for innovation
Still Amazon, without any of the above qualities or recognition, snatched up the market that was not even related to their core business.
These businesses are further apart than if IKEA would sell call services to businesses.

Big marketing and product marketing mistakes can happen in any company: even market leaders do fail big time as they are even more blurred by their own success and their self-satisfaction.

What are your product management mistakes?

A few weeks ago we found out the market leader in Marketing Automation, Demand Generation and Lead Management has copied our Activity charts concept.

We have noticed several website visits by the company during the year 2008 and a few at the beginning of this year as our web service LEADSExplorer registers all companies visiting our website.
They have adopted the idea and concept and added some features.

Activity charts

These Activity charts represent the activity of the visitors of a company combined with the communications with the different people in this company on a time axis.

The visit activity is represented by the intensity of the color (more pages viewed) and the height (duration of a visit).

The communications include: emails, telephone calls, white paper downloads, completed forms: each represented by a different color.

The purpose is to analyze:
- The increase or decrease of the interest in the solutions you offer.
- The effectiveness of the nurturing for both leads and customers.
- The efforts for customer retention.

Proof of having a vision and being successful

We can only be proud that we had the vision of the concept of these Activity charts long before the market leader.
Getting copied is a proof of innovation, vision and success.
In many markets, market leaders have copied the smaller companies as they challenge them.

We are not worried as there are still several functions, features and concepts within the LEADSExplorer solution that sets us apart and we are not direct competitors.

However we have the challenge to keep one step ahead of the competitors by providing new, useful and convenient solutions beneficial to our clients: the drive to innovate.

Have you ever been copied?
Or do you copy others?

Business cards are outdated

In this video Joel Bauer declares your business card is crap.

In the video he shows the business card that took him 25 years to design, costing $4 and not fitting in a Rolodex. Seems a waste of 25 years.
Moreover a Rolodex is a relic of the past (over 25 years), but so is his newly developed card.

Business cards not adapted for social networking websites

Still he is probably right that your business card is crap for many other good reasons:
The business card is a thing of the past, not adapted anymore to the online world and online life people live, even in business.
Eventhough your mobile phone number, your email address and your company website have been added in print, the card will always miss your online presence that goes beyond your email address: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace, and many more …
- All people have many presences on the Internet
- Not enough space on the card for all the links
- Online changes happen faster than the printing of a new stack of cards: you can’t keep up.
- Entering data from a business card into any computer system is a waste of time (so 70’s).

The Poken as business card

At the same time in some countries in Europe a new craze has started: the Poken.
It connects the online social networking into the real world.

Actually it is a USB memory key with an RFID antenna.
You know the RFID technology from the card people use to open a door of a building: physical access.
The RFID is used to exchange data.

The idea is you store your online credentials on the Poken using the USB connection on your PC.
Online credentials like your LinkedIn page, your Facebook page, your Twitter page, your MySpace page or your personal website.

When you meet with somebody new you exchange your online credentials by nearing your Pokens. If the data has been transferred the Poken hand will glow green. If faulty the hand will glow red.

Up to 64 contacts can be stored on the Poken. If you don’t upload the data to the website on the Internet, the oldest contact will be erased from the memory when adding on a next contact.
Price is about €15 or $20 and to be purchased online of course.
The company Poken SA is from Lausanne in Switzerland and has a presence on Facebook.

Already popular in schools, not yet in use for business: but that can change soon.
If teenagers can use it, their parents will be able too: they just need to ask their kids.

Will you next business card be a fancy paper card or will you have a Poken?

Towers for news

Centuries ago in Europe merchants build towers to lookout for ships to arrive on the river to the harbor. Upon this knowledge they could prepare and act.
The number of people informed was limited.
The communication model was 1 tot 1.

Newspapers

Two centuries ago newspapers could spread the news with a delay of a day.
The number of people informed was relatively large: those who could read and afford a newspaper.
The communication model was from a limited number of sources to a large audience: thus very controllable and censurable.

Telex

A century ago the telex could bring you news instantly to your office.
Having this knowledge they could speculate or arrange before others could.
As telex was expensive, the number of informed people was small, but they had the advantage of immediate information delivery over long distances.
Again the communication model was 1 to 1 as there was a high price to pay for the high speed, which has an economic value.

Telephone

Then telephone could bring the news even quicker as there was no need for coding and decoding the message, decreasing the cost of news delivery and no knowledge to operate (make a call).
The communication model was 1 to 1. Due to the popularity the operating cost decreased significantly.

Broadcasting

First there was radio and later TV, both broadcasting to millions of people instantly.
Thus the competitive advantage of other information carriers was lost: newspapers needed to rethink their business.
Still the number of sources was limited and the distribution of information was still expensive, but was affordable by the large audience and was sponsored by advertising.
The number of sources was rather limited, but audience was massive (millions).

The Internet

The Internet allowed access to a wide range of sources of information and news almost without boundaries.
At first the established news agencies started to distribute their content over the Internet.
A few years into the Internet age as both the cost of access and the cost of publishing on the internet decreased, individual bloggers started to distribute news, information and their views too.
This changed the information from a limited number of sources into multiple sources distributing information to different smaller audiences.
The established news agencies couldn’t compete or control anymore.

Mobile phones

Nowadays everyone in business has a mobile telephone allowing staying updated everywhere.
Thus people can stay up-to-date anywhere in the world with news from anywhere.
Again this is a 1 to 1 communication model with the advantage that both parties don’t need to be in a fixed location.
A smart phone is even better as it can receive the news from a range of selected sources thus not limited to a 1 to 1 communication model.

Mobile Micro Blogging

Mobile micro blogging has changed the distribution of information: anyone can send out a message by texting (sms) or from the Internet to a central aggregator (like Twitter, Plurk or Jaiku), which can be followed by many from anywhere.
This has become a system of multiple sources aggregated and distributed to multiple sources. Operating at a fairly low and affordable price or even free!

That is why this Mobile Micro Blogging is so unique and very disruptive.
Example: the Twitter messages about the terrorist attack in Mumbai

The world has become a village

As around 80% of the world population is covered by mobile networks and about 4 billion mobile phones are in use, the majority of people have access to mobile phones.
Most of these mobile phones (75%) can send an SMS (texting) allowing sending a message to an aggregator.
Hence the world has become a village where anyone can distribute information to the masses at a low cost: the cost of sending a sms (texting).

This fast mobile one-person-to-many broadcast communication has become a problem for companies, leaders and governments as there are no more barriers.

Let’s hope the connection between all people and cultures brings peace and will keep peace in the world as it will be very difficult to keep anything secret or not being broadcasted.

Everybody can own and know the news and it is no longer a priviledge for a selective group of people.
The power of news has changed definitely.
Will you be able to use it for your business?

The CRM as it has been

There are so many vendors, so many solutions, so many different marketing packages, but all the CRM solutions come down to the same:
A CRM a relational data base having:
- Input forms: leads, customers, projects, salesmen, products
- Search screens: on all the above and many of their combinations
- Reports using the same data

Standard relational data base systems
All the CRM solutions are based on the standard Structured Query Language (SQL) statements for inserting, appending and retrieving information in or from the relational data base.

In order to imagine what is a relational data base: a spreadsheet where the different worksheets are the tables with data:
- The rows of each worksheet are the records: a record for every customer
- The columns are the fields: customer name, customer address,…
Several worksheets make up the complete information about the customers: contact details, contact history, projects,…
SQL allows to querying and inserting data into the different tables.
More on CRM and relational data base here.

In order to solve more complex problems of data located in different tables, the different relational data base tables are being joined.
All these features and methods are standard for relational data base systems.

All this relational data base technology was commercially available on a large scale since the mid-eighties from several vendors: like Oracle and several others. Thus there is nothing technically new since long ago.

Variations on the same CRM theme
Many flavors and other approaches have been created addressing different segments of the market: CRM for call centers, CRM for after sales, CRM small businesses, CRM for project companies, …
All of them are variations on the same pattern: a relational data base with entry forms and reports.

Web service as innovation?

Since 2000 the new technology feature is offering a CRM as a web service (Saas Software as a service), eliminating the setup, running costs and no IT expertise required.
However this is no innovation as the functions and features remained the same.

Mobile CRM

At the same time several attempts have been made to use the CRM on mobile phones.
The high cost of mobile data communication has limited the adoption of mobile CRM.
Thanks to the availability of Wifi, the cost of mobile CRM has become affordable.
As the quality of the displays of mobile phones is increasing CRM on your mobile will become a standard feature.

Disruptive changes in business

Since the nineties email, Internet and mobile communications have been introduced and have changed radically the way people do business.
As businesses have undergone disruptive changes in their methods of work it is time to change the CRM too.

Disruptive changes in CRM

New innovative CRM solutions are required in order to cope with the changes:
A solution which helps the sales and marketing people by collecting all the electronic available data from multiple sources:
- The email communications
- The Internet: company website data, news feeds, social website data
- The website where your leads and customers visit: visit data
- The intranet for data from within the company

Instead of a data entry and reporting system, the CRM needs to change into an aggregator of data from different sources.

All data that already exists in electronic format needs to be used by the CRM, without being re-entered, for lead generation, customer nurturing and selling.

The evolution of CRM:
1. The first new solutions have aggregated the email communications by customer.

2. Then solutions have integrated information available on the Internet.

3. A next step is to integrate the visit data from your website by company (leads and customers).

4. Finally the information locked up within disparate systems within the company will need to be integrated. This is the most difficult as there is no standard or uniform data storage use and no uniform data retrieval available.

The benefits of CRM changes:
This change is very disruptive from the fairly simple data entry and reporting systems to complex data aggregator systems that will serve sales and marketing in order to:
- Better lead generation
- Improve nurturing customers
- Increase sales
- Decrease significantly the amount of administrative work and time wasted
Thus increasing profits.

Note: LEADSExplorer provides email, Internet and website visit data aggregation as a web service.