Author Archive - Dan Kashma
Microsoft Office Applications for Facebook?
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Written By Dan Kashman | November 9, 2007 | Share This
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Enough has been written this week about Facebook’s new advertising solution that allows marketers to reach consumer through “Social Ads” and branded “Facebook Pages”. My favorite take on the recent announcement has got to be that of Nick Carr and his view of the impending MySpace-ification of Facebook. Making things more interesting, Microsoft announced last week that it has expanded its advertising relationship with Facebook and that it has made a $240 million equity investment.
In light of recent announcements, I’m surprised that no one has been discussing a more obvious and natural extension of Microsoft’s business and a huge potential revenue generator for Facebook: porting the Microsoft Office suite to Facebook applications.
Picture this; you are busy checking to see which of your “friends” has uploaded new photos from their office Halloween party when you are alerted to the fact that Joe Schmo just added the Microsoft Excel application. You click on Joe’s alert to install the Excel app onto your own Facebook profile, and see an invite to collaborate with Joe through Excel. Incidentally, you and Joe have been considering teaming up to start the next great web-based business, so both of you download the PowerPoint app and subsequently send an invitation to your developer friend who helps you hammer out a 10 slide pitch deck. The pitch deck then gets converted into a SlideShare presentation that is ready for distribution–perhaps as a “wall post”–to your venture capitalist friends.
For Facebook, of course, an MS Office suite of applications broadens the range of activities available to their 52 Million + user base, allowing them to create and share documents, spreadsheets and presentations, while increasing the time spent on site from today’s respectable 20 minutes a day to something orders of magnitude greater. The permission system already present in Facebook allows users to share these documents with fine grain control without ever having to attach anything to an E-mail.
As scary as this concept may be to the folks in Redmond, they must realize that their $16 billion dollar a year crown jewel is under attack. If you are a college student or a recent college grad, are you really willing to pay $150 - $500 to put MS Office on your machine? Google is banking on the fact that you might be interested in a less expensive albeit less feature rich, substitute for something along the lines of $0.
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Engendering Loyalty with Social Media
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Written By Dan Kashman | September 27, 2007 | Share This
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In his seminal 1996 book, The Loyalty Effect, Frederick Reicheld wrote,
“By observing the behavior of customers, employees and investors (do they or don’t they come back for more?), you can quite straightforwardly determine where value is being delivered and where it isn’t, and by extension, whether a business is succeeding or failing in its mission to create lasting value.”
Although written well before the advent of blogs, RSS or wikis, Reicheld’s message of retention and engagement as a measure of value has never been more relevant than in today’s hypercompetitive, technology-driven business environment. For companies both big and small, the stakes have never been higher, nor the opportunities more pervasive, as individuals are playing a vital role in evangelizing (or marginalizing) brands. But it’s up to companies to see themselves as collaborators – to have the courage to share their ideas with, and solicit unfiltered feedback from, their customers – or, I should say, co-creators. Social media can help companies both share and listen while accelerating growth and keeping stakeholder interests aligned. In short, social media makes the web a 24/7 focus group, or the world’s largest public suggestion box.
It all sounds good in theory, but when it comes to applying social media to your business, how do you actually weave together these dynamic communication platforms to engender loyalty from your customers, employees, and investors?
I think conversational communication is at the core of all of these strategies, and the findings released by Yahoo yesterday confirm this. Whether this communication means maintaining a blog that is open to honest feedback from customers, investors, and industry watchers, or engaging with an audience that has Facebook at the center of its online universe, companies engaged in social media are telling their stakeholders that they’re open to input and will be responsive to their comments. Their constituencies, in turn, will surface issues sooner, use social platforms for self-service (translating into a lower cost to serve), and will be more likely to act as brand advocates. The ultimate reward for these those companies is increased loyalty.
My hope is that, through a series of posts on the topic, the community will offer new perspectives and a critical examination of emerging best practices in this area.