Outside Innovation

How to Avoid the 4 Biggest Pitfalls in Customer Engagements

By Patricia Seybold

There’s nothing worse than recruiting customers to work with you to come up with new solutions and then falling flat on your face because you weren’t actually able to deliver what customers wanted. That has happened to us and our clients a few times. But we’ve learned a lot from those experiences. And you are the beneficiaries. We’ve distilled what we’ve learned from our failures and near misses into a set of clear success metrics.

Secret to Successful Customer Engagements
Beware of These Four Things that Will Doom Your Customer-Centric Initiatives
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO & Sr. Consultant, September 27, 2013

(Read the short sample and download the full article in PDF.)

 

Is There Hidden Value in Twitter?

Last week, Twitter announced it will go public soon, in the obvious way, with a tweet. This IPO pre-announcement set the pundits and analysts buzzing about the possible value of the company based on revenue and earnings multiples, monetization strategies, mobile marketshare, and the value of the customer profile information that Twitter could mine about the 500 million or so people who tweet.

© 2013 Business Insider

But there’s one ingredient that Twitter brings to the party that’s being under-hyped: customers’ rising use of Twitter for customer support. Unlike Facebook or LinkedIn or many other social media darlings, Twitter fills a real need that customers have: the need to get quick answers and problem resolution.

Crowd-Sourcing Safety in War Zones

Given the recent news reports about chemical weapons in Syria, terrorist attacks, violence against citizens, and warfare waging in many cities around the world, I was struck by the fact that the Financial Times newspaper devoted coveted space on its first page on September 3^rd, 2013 to an article about two mobile phone apps currently being used in Lebanon, entitled: The must-have accessory for war—app that keeps you out of danger. The first App is called Ma2too3a. The FT reporter, Abigail Fielding-Smith wrote: “It takes crowd-sourced information from its users about protests, traffic, roadblocks, and clashes and then feeds it into a map.” The developer, Mohammad Taha, developed the app after his wife and children got caught in gunfire driving home from school in Beirut. They were OK, but quite frightened. This app has more than 80,000 downloads.

Another mobile app under development is described by Abigail Fielding-Smith in the same article: “The idea of Firas Wazneh’s ‘Way to Safety,’ is that users can record gunfire and send it to the site, which will identify the weapon from a sound database and triangulate recordings to pinpoint the exact location and type of fighting.” 

As I read about these two different, but related, uses of crowdsourcing for mobile phone apps in Beirut, I was struck by how powerful and useful our mobile phones have become as literal life-saving devices, and how awesome it is that crowdsourced information can be quickly harnessed and mobilized to help people help each other. My other reaction: what is our world coming to that this is the way people have to live!

When Mobile Phones Are Free….Where Will Most Innovation Come From?

Rumor has it that Amazon’s next mobile phone will be free—presumably subsidized by the increase in impulse downloads and purchases we do from our handy phones. On Tuesday, September 10, Apple announced its lower cost iPhone 5C. Technology analysts quickly reported that the low-cost phone is still too expensive in China.

But, guess what, phones and phone service are already getting really inexpensive in the developing world. I was listening to a 2010 TED Talk by Nathan Eagle on Mobile Crowdsourcing, in which he reported that, in Kenya, you can buy a phone, complete with a SIM card and airtime for $15. I highly recommend this TedTalk. Nathan points out that “in reality, the vast majority of web surfers live in the developing world. There’s more people using mobile phones, living in rural villages in developing countries than every western white collar worker on earth. The mobile phone is a developing world technology. It’s their technology. They represent the vast majority of the users and ultimately it has impacted their lives far greater than it has impacted our lives.”

Nathan Eagle points out something that I have observed in my semi-annual peregrinations to Uganda--that everyone in every rural village now has access to a mobile phone, and the applications they use include many that are more sophisticated than what we have—such as the ability to easily and securely pay for things and to transfer money from person to person.

So, as we watch the jockeying for position between Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft in the mobile phone space over the coming months. Let’s remember: the REAL battle is for the pockets of the billions of people who live, work and play in the developing world.

Good Profile of the People Edward Snowden Trusts with His Revelations

As I have written before, I believe that Snowden is a hero who is risking his life and has sacrificed his liberty to blow the whistle on the profound violations of our human right to freedom from surveillance. This long article, How Laura Poitras Helped Snowden Spill His Secrets by Peter Maass, published on August 13, 2013 in the New York Times Magazine, is well worth your time. It describes the dangers and difficulties being faced by those to whom Snowden entrusted the information he wanted to expose in order to wake us all up before it’s too late. Why did Snowden select Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald to trust? Peter Maass explains:

“In our encrypted chat, Snowden explained why he went to Poitras with his secrets: ‘Laura and Glenn are among the few who reported fearlessly on controversial topics throughout this period, even in the face of withering personal criticism, [which] resulted in Laura specifically becoming targeted by the very programs involved in the recent disclosures. She had demonstrated the courage, personal experience and skill needed to handle what is probably the most dangerous assignment any journalist can be given — reporting on the secret misdeeds of the most powerful government in the world — making her an obvious choice.’”

My reaction to reading this profile of “a day in the lives” of Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald is one of admiration. The dedication they both have to protecting Snowden from harm, yet putting themselves under constant surveillance, is awe-inspiring. I’m looking forward to Laura’s documentary.

Recent Important Articles about Surveillance

Here are some articles that have been curated by Scott Jordan and discussed in Patty’s Pioneers’ group over the past few weeks. I have found them to be really informative and provocative. I hope you will too:

Good Articles on NSA Privacy Debate

• How We Killed Privacy – in 4 Easy Steps; Stop blaming the NSA. We did this to ourselves, by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Kelsey D. Atherton, published in Foreign Policy on August 23, 2013:

  “Four distinct factors have interacted to kill electronic privacy: a legal framework that has remained largely static since the 1970s, significant changes in our use of rapidly evolving technology, commercial providers' increasingly intrusive tracking of our every online habit, and a growth in non-state threats that has made governments the world over obsess about uncovering these dangers. Only by understanding the interaction between these factors can we begin the necessary discussion about what privacy means in the 21st century — and how to forge a new social compact to address the issue.”

  What I found particularly interesting in this analysis was the authors’ discussion about “Pen Registers” – the data about whom you call on the phone. And the notion that:

  “In other words, when a third party [your phone company] is able to see what a person is doing in an electronic environment, no reasonable expectation of privacy exists.”

  This article does a good job of summarizing the slippery slope we’ve already gone down when it comes to protection of privacy and freedom from surveillance.

• 1,000 Sys Admins Can Copy Any NSA Document Without Anyone Knowing About It; Think Only Snowden Did? by Mike Masnik, published August 26, 2013 in TechDirt. After quoting a recent report that audited NSA’s current practices, Mike writes:

  “So we're left with an agency that collects a ridiculous amount of info, and has around 1,000 employees (who are mostly actually employed by outside contractors) who can look through anything with no tracking, leaving no trace, and we're told that the data isn't abused. Really? … And, do they believe that none of the people whom those thousand sys admins are friends with haven't had their friend "check out" information on someone else? …
  
  Basically, it seems clear that the NSA has simply no idea how many abuses there were, and there are a very large number of people who had astounding levels of access and absolutely no controls or way to trace what they were doing.”

• My Favorite is this “spoof” site: http://getprsm.com/. It positions the NSA’s Prism intelligence tool as a consumer service: A great service you can use to preserve and share all your information with everyone.