Steve Makofsky from the Platforms Incubation group at Microsoft recently asked a good question in his blog: Are products better because of blogs? Sure, blogging evangelists talk up the benefits of transparency, openness, conversations with your customers,... Read More

Jeremiah has a post about the Supernova conference he recently attended. In this he talks about a question that was asked of Jonathan Schwartz the CEO of Sun. "should CEOs blog?"The notes on his answer are "John, refers to CEOs 5 years ago not... Read More

Congratulations Fred Reicheld. Reicheld's book The Ultimate Question published by Harvard Business School is now the number one best selling business book in both the Wall St Journal and USA Today lists. Like all such titles you need to be discerning... Read More

There are two feeds that I read regularly which have just been through a site redesign. Jeremiah's web strategy blog and Lifehacker. Both of these have gone about it in different ways. Lifehacker went big bang and just changed the site overnight,... Read More

Yesterday at their Professional Developers Conference in LA, Microsoft announced the launch of Azure their new cloud services platform and to support it, the www.azure.com site, which our team built. It's great to see a site which has such huge importance... Read More

Some ideas here from T-Mobile and Tiger beer on tactics for converting customers into evangelists from a story that ran on BBC online. Basically they ran 'underground' events for small (>500 people) customer groups, to create buzz around their brands,... Read More

Mozilla Firefox users are continually coming up with inventive ways to promote their favorite Web browser. The Fox Tales blog reports that one enterprising lad recently began a "Firefox for Prom Queen" campaign at his high school.Sadly, the school ruled... Read More

Scoble has a post in which, among a whole load of other things, he talks about some info that came up at an MSN advertising conference. "I’ll tell you what executives from big companies (like Kraft, Procter and Gamble, GM, and others) who were at... Read More

I'm just back from presenting at Customer Reference Forum Europe. This was the first gathering of customer reference professionals in Europe and was brought together by the illustrious Bill Lee who, as always, did a great job as host and facilitator.... Read More

Scoble has a post in which, among a whole load of other things, he talks about some info that came up at an MSN advertising conference. "I’ll tell you what executives from big companies (like Kraft, Procter and Gamble, GM, and others) who were at... Read More

First Jeremiah took up the story with a long post on the Impacts of Social Media on Corporate Customer Reference Programs. Kindly he linked back to a post I made after the last Customer Reference event in Europe. (I'm pleased to say Bill Lee has... Read More

Fresh from two weeks vacation (its a European thing), I find myself at Bill Lee's Spring Customer Reference Forum in Berkeley, California. Having reached the West Coast via Switzerland and then London, I'm catching up on email, blogging and sleep (there's... Read More

I'll follow up with a more considered post - day two starts shortly... In terms of highlights, keynote yesterday was Ben McConnell. Ben manfully overcame the worst that the evil god of AV snafus can do to a man in front of a big audience. Luckily thanks... Read More

In the previous post I referenced Ben McConnell's red shoes - by the end of his presentation an essential prop. In bloggerazzi fashion, after meeting Ben I snapped him and his shoes.  What's the story with the shoes? Go here.... Read More

Finally got to meet Jeremiah Owyang today. He highlighted today's session at the Customer Reference Forum. After cuddly Ben yesterday, today we got scary Jeremiah. Not scary personally of course. He's a friendly guy and his heritage in running customer... Read More

Having attended the Customer Reference Forum last week and spent a little over two days discussing the management of reference programs, what are my key takeaways? I shouldn't say this but... well... reference programs aren't rocket science. Sure,... Read More

Another panel of interest that I attended at the 2006 Penny Arcade Expo was "Forums, Blogs and Fanbois: The Role of Community and PR in the Game Industry". Here are my notes from the event. Although the discussion focuses on gaming fans and game development,... Read More

In another example of the new tyranny of direct customer interaction, US social networking site Facebook has outraged members of its community with some site enhancements that have been interpreted as threatening the privacy of users - see adaywithoutfacebook.... Read More

It's bad enough that MySpace greets me at login with a huge ad for a dating service called TRUE that screens out "marrieds" - which I am. Why, MySpace, do I continue to see this ad when my profle SAYS that I am married? Are you assuming that I'm going... Read More

Frodo of The Weekly Geek - one of my favorite podcasts - examines the fruits of Nintendo's blogger-oriented marketing campaign for its upcoming Wii gaming system, and finds what he believes to be a deep flaw.Nintendo has recently rolled out a new marketing... Read More

This is a bit of a me-centric post but then its not everyday you change the name of the company you founded 18 years ago (myself, Clare and Paul). So bear with it. Officially Monday we change our name. For eighteen years we have been Write Image, on... Read More

It may just be serendipity but shortly after our customer advocacy team has completed their first project for Alliance & Leicester - their first client in the financial services sector - and have started discussions with a second (too early to share),... Read More

Bill Lee - aka Mr Customer Reference Forum - asked me for guidance to pass on to a member seeking to rebuild their customer success stories web site. I passed back some quick views and opinions.   Thinking this might be of interest to others,... Read More

Metia is sponsoring Bill Lee's Customer Reference Forum event again in 2009. Bill has cornered the market in this particular arena. He puts a lot of hard work into making a great event and deserves his success. The 2009 event is in Berkeley during... Read More

Further to that last post. It's great that Forrester is applying increasing attention to the area of customer reference programs. The more science that is available to evidence ROI, or to document and validate good and bad practice can only be of... Read More

Linus Gregoriadis, head of research at E-consultancy has just completed their Social Commerce Report 2007 (sponsored by vendor BazaarVoice). Eight hundred organizations responded to the survey, including 360 classified as online sellers, the... Read More

At Satisfaction anyone can list a company, product, or service on the site. Then other users can post their questions, complaints, and suggestions. Support comes from the Satisfaction community, though ideally the company in question will... Read More

Nielsen completed a global survey - 26,000+ consumers in 47 markets - which has confirmed that consumers place the greatest trust in... recommendations from other consumers. Well, we all knew that, but its good to have some more confirmation. More interesting... Read More

I learn things at our offsites too. In London last week, our quietly understated content and editorial team took the stage. In the past 12 months this 40 strong team, spread across London, Seattle and Singapore, have: Produced no fewer than 1,353... Read More

This is a topic I'm discussing a lot at present. Mostly it is around the intersection of community building to foster dialogue and relationships, and then engaging those customers as advocates in the sales process. Recently we have been advising... Read More

This is a cool 2.0 style tool to add into any communications or customer reference program. One aspect of our work within the area of customer advocacy is helping clients to communicate their positive customer stories to other customers, employees... Read More

I'm just back from presenting at Customer Reference Forum Europe. This was the first gathering of customer reference professionals in Europe and was brought together by the illustrious Bill Lee who, as always, did a great job as host and facilitator.... Read More

I've posted my notes from the Blog Business Summit on this site as articles, because as posts they were just too long.I've cleaned them up a bit but they're still a little rough. But they're notes, right? Not transcripts. However, if you attended the... Read More

First Jeremiah took up the story with a long post on the Impacts of Social Media on Corporate Customer Reference Programs. Kindly he linked back to a post I made after the last Customer Reference event in Europe. (I'm pleased to say Bill Lee has... Read More

Sadly, I wasn't able to post to this blog from South by Southwest Interactive 2007. However, I did update Twitter frequently using my mobile phone. So if you were watching Twitter you knew, for example, that I was at one point tossed into the back of... Read More

Fresh from two weeks vacation (its a European thing), I find myself at Bill Lee's Spring Customer Reference Forum in Berkeley, California. Having reached the West Coast via Switzerland and then London, I'm catching up on email, blogging and sleep (there's... Read More

I'll follow up with a more considered post - day two starts shortly... In terms of highlights, keynote yesterday was Ben McConnell. Ben manfully overcame the worst that the evil god of AV snafus can do to a man in front of a big audience. Luckily thanks... Read More

In the previous post I referenced Ben McConnell's red shoes - by the end of his presentation an essential prop. In bloggerazzi fashion, after meeting Ben I snapped him and his shoes.  What's the story with the shoes? Go here.... Read More

Finally got to meet Jeremiah Owyang today. He highlighted today's session at the Customer Reference Forum. After cuddly Ben yesterday, today we got scary Jeremiah. Not scary personally of course. He's a friendly guy and his heritage in running customer... Read More

Having attended the Customer Reference Forum last week and spent a little over two days discussing the management of reference programs, what are my key takeaways? I shouldn't say this but... well... reference programs aren't rocket science. Sure,... Read More

Congratulations Fred Reicheld. Reicheld's book The Ultimate Question published by Harvard Business School is now the number one best selling business book in both the Wall St Journal and USA Today lists. Like all such titles you need to be discerning... Read More

Some ideas here from T-Mobile and Tiger beer on tactics for converting customers into evangelists from a story that ran on BBC online. Basically they ran 'underground' events for small (>500 people) customer groups, to create buzz around their brands,... Read More

In another example of the new tyranny of direct customer interaction, US social networking site Facebook has outraged members of its community with some site enhancements that have been interpreted as threatening the privacy of users - see adaywithoutfacebook.... Read More

This is a bit of a me-centric post but then its not everyday you change the name of the company you founded 18 years ago (myself, Clare and Paul). So bear with it. Officially Monday we change our name. For eighteen years we have been Write Image, on... Read More

Linus Gregoriadis, head of research at E-consultancy has just completed their Social Commerce Report 2007 (sponsored by vendor BazaarVoice). Eight hundred organizations responded to the survey, including 360 classified as online sellers, the... Read More

Nielsen completed a global survey - 26,000+ consumers in 47 markets - which has confirmed that consumers place the greatest trust in... recommendations from other consumers. Well, we all knew that, but its good to have some more confirmation. More interesting... Read More

I learn things at our offsites too. In London last week, our quietly understated content and editorial team took the stage. In the past 12 months this 40 strong team, spread across London, Seattle and Singapore, have: Produced no fewer than 1,353... Read More

This is a topic I'm discussing a lot at present. Mostly it is around the intersection of community building to foster dialogue and relationships, and then engaging those customers as advocates in the sales process. Recently we have been advising... Read More

This is a cool 2.0 style tool to add into any communications or customer reference program. One aspect of our work within the area of customer advocacy is helping clients to communicate their positive customer stories to other customers, employees... Read More

Neil Davey, Editor of the excellent MyCustomer.com rehashes a Net Promoter critique in this piece today. Its slightly old news (I'm sure I saw this debate being aired a long time back, but it appears to have resurfaced recently in another... Read More

I can't make it to Bill Lee's Customer Reference Forum 2008 next week in Berkeley - a heavily pregnant wife means getting on a plane to the West Coast isn't sensible. Which is a shame because it's a great event and I always enjoy it. My colleagues... Read More

This BusinessWeek article relates that Jason Knight, CEO of web start up Wesabe is available to speak to customers for four hours every day. He gets three or four calls a day directed from a link on the Wesabe home page. That's from a user base of 100,000... Read More

As Steve mentioned I’m at the Customer Reference Forum this week and will be presenting later on for newcomers to reference management about the infrastructure required to manage an effective program. This morning I was thinking about a theme to base... Read More

There are two feeds that I read regularly which have just been through a site redesign. Jeremiah's web strategy blog and Lifehacker.Both of these have gone about it in different ways.Lifehacker went big bang and just changed the site overnight, loads... Read More

Neil Davey, Editor of the excellent MyCustomer.com rehashes a Net Promoter critique in this piece today. Its slightly old news (I'm sure I saw this debate being aired a long time back, but it appears to have resurfaced recently in another... Read More

Jeremiah has a post about the Supernova conference he recently attended. In this he talks about a question that was asked of Jonathan Schwartz the CEO of Sun. "should CEOs blog?"The notes on his answer are "John, refers to CEOs 5 years ago not... Read More

ComScore reckons Google is losing its lustre. Apparently Facebook frenzy has topped out and is slip sliding downhill. While investor Roger Ehrenberg worries about the lack of a strategy for monetization of audiences in social networks. Alternatively,... Read More

Having glibly introduced the subject of Phorm in the previous post, I spent a little longer looking at the storm brewing around it. Its interesting on a number of levels. Phorm looks to be following Dell's well trodden path to online purgatory. Of course,... Read More

Good post here by Gartner's Richard Fouts on using customer references across the breadth of an organization. It comes complete with this nifty little quote from Richard: "Case in point: now that Metia has supercharged Microsoft’s customer reference... Read More

At Satisfaction anyone can list a company, product, or service on the site. Then other users can post their questions, complaints, and suggestions. Support comes from the Satisfaction community, though ideally the company in question will... Read More

I've posted my notes from the Blog Business Summit on this site as articles, because as posts they were just too long.I've cleaned them up a bit but they're still a little rough. But they're notes, right? Not transcripts. However, if you attended the... Read More

Sadly, I wasn't able to post to this blog from South by Southwest Interactive 2007. However, I did update Twitter frequently using my mobile phone. So if you were watching Twitter you knew, for example, that I was at one point tossed into the back of... Read More

This article in Saturday's New York Times says that running contests in which customers create ads doesn't save the client any money, doesn't take work away from agencies, and - in the case of the Heinz "Top This!" challenge - results in a lot of awful... Read More

This article in Saturday's New York Times says that running contests in which customers create ads doesn't save the client any money, doesn't take work away from agencies, and - in the case of the Heinz "Top This!" challenge - results in a lot of awful... Read More

              A story from Ad Age in the US highlights an area where the UK is moving ahead of America. From May 26th it will become illegal for marketers and their agencies to seed positive references... Read More