Third Idea Consulting

I keep forgetting that there are other settings for San Francisco weather than, “hey, that’s really nice.”

Tuesday at Oracle Open World was the single worst climatic day I’ve ever experienced in California, and in fact the heaviest rain the state had seen since 1962. That’s right—the last time it poured like this, the LA Dodgers were still a relatively new idea, the NY Mets were truly new (and truly terrible, losing 120 games their first season), and working class people could still afford to see a baseball game. If you’re wondering why I keep referring to baseball, it’s because I’ve spent most of my time here in the company of Paul Greenberg, a fine fellow traveler who harbors a passion for America’s Pastime and a deep, uncanny lust for the NY Yankees. For better or worse, Oracle Open World + the Bronx Bombers in the postseason = associating enterprise CRM with baseball whenever Paul’s in the room.

Back to the weather: It’s fitting that the skies opened up and drenched us, because Tuesday amounted to Cloud Computing Day at the show. There are plenty of software-as-a-service (are we still calling it that?) vendors at this convention, and in fact they’ve got their own section of the show floor staked out in Moscone South, but the biggest one of all—Salesforce.com—pulled out all the stops. In addition to their sizable booth presence (not in the SaaS area) and excellent T-shirts, there’s a fleet of SFDC-liveried Mini Coopers circling the downtown area. As a special treat, Marc Benioff himself hosted a session in the nearby Yerba Buena Arts Center.

By “special,” I mean there was a massive queue of people waiting in the drenching rain, with no shelter, for a good half hour. By “treat,” I mean SFDC was giving away HD flip cameras to the first 500 attendees, which probably helps explain the queue. To be fair to myself, though, I didn’t know about the camera until after I was indoors, so my soaked-to-the-skin experience was all about seeing what Marc would have to say in Larry Ellison’s back yard.

If I’m honest, I must say that there was little news to be had at the event, at least for people who track SFDC at all closely. Marc modified his message to play better for the enterprise crowd that comes to OOW, many of whom are less interested in SaaS than his typical audience, and the demos were compelling for those who hadn’t seen them before. As always, Marc brought his considerable force of personality to bear, and made a strong case for cloud computing. He was respectful of his host (a company that has a cloud product of its own) and didn’t step on toes, though I felt the overall effect was toeing the line. SFDC makes all its bones on the cloud, whereas Oracle devotes only a relatively small amount of its efforts in that direction; to make that strong case at the show of somebody who is comparatively weak in that area is bordering on poor taste. Note that I said bordering; Marc and his team stayed classy, but controversial enough for me to point it out.

There are numerous companies here using the appearance of unrest as their marketing approach, arguably with less class. They cover a range, from businesses I’ve never heard of to Microsoft SQL Server, all taking turns on the streetcorner with placards, prisoner costumes, and the rhetoric of a World Bank protest to generate interest. It’s such a common theme this year that I wonder if there was a planning meeting with Oracle to plan it. Phrases like “Better Dead than Red” (stolen from the McCarthy era), “Encryption Shouldn’t Be a Pain in the App,” and “Stop the Spindle Swindle” are stuck in my head, though I doubt any of the associated companies will follow suit. The use of protest imagery by so many organizations dulls the effect of each, so it looks like the sort of picketing you can safely tune out.

On another note, I get a second chance to hear Larry Ellison speak this afternoon, at the 2:45 closing keynote. While it’s too late for me to redeem my Sunday failure (necessary though it was), it will help my sense of accomplishment for the week. More importantly, I get to see one of my idols. Not Larry—Roger Daltrey of The Who will be performing at tonight’s appreciation event. The headliner is Aerosmith, and we’ll also have a shot at Three Dog Night, The Wailers, and Shooter Jennings, but for me it’s all about Rog.

It’s Tuesday, thus time for Monday’s bloggery. I pretty much failed to liveblog Oracle Open World’s keynote, but at least it wasn’t through my incompetence; spotty WiFi and simultaneous Twitter overloads and outages conspired to keep me mostly silent, and the rest of the day had me on the move too much to post for you.

So many things happened Monday at oracle open world, though to be honest I think the day needed to accelerate before it got really good. The morning keynote led by Charles Phillips and Safra Catz was fairly sedate, as it felt like there was no binding force between the many segments. To be fair, I missed the Sunday night keynote due to personal burnout, so it’s entirely possible that Larry Ellison-a man I’ve never heard speak in person-really did the setting of tone last night and Monday was the start of the “business” part of the conference. Esteban Kolsky pointed out that there was an undercurrent of unrest in the room (something you never want when there are more than 10,000 people), and his tweets really captured the flow of the morning. He had much beter WiFi connectivity than I did, and seemed less affected by the problems experienced by Twitter, so I recommend checking out @ekolsky to see all the stuff I wanted to liveblog. Props to Esteban.

There were two stand-out segments, though. One was with Anthony Lye, which (and whom) I’ll come back to in a moment. The other dealt with retail, particularly “fast fashion” as implemented by H&M.

I have no use for the store or its brand, but I must say that the way H&M is using Oracle technology to change the way the apparel industry works. Any apparel business can (and should) use CRM and ERP technologies to make their purchases more efficient, but that still uses the antique method of basing inventory decisions solely on the debut of fashion “seasons” that might be nine months ahead of actual time. Fast fashion is a step beyond. Presenter Duncan Angove and an associate whose name I missed explained how H&M uses it to spot current trends and new products and act on them every month, perhaps even sooner. Combined with dashboards linked to regional maps, this means H&M can put what items will be most likely to sell well in each individual store, change out stock efficiently, and entice customers with promotions as needed to keep sales coming. Smart business and satisfied customers.

Now to Anthony Lye, who gets the other allotment of props for Monday. His part of the keynote delivered what the entire session should have done: a real tactical and strategic sense of how enterprise apps (like CRM) fit into a company’s efforts to increase efficiency and profitability, but without ever forgetting that it’s all about the customers and what you can do to make them not just content to do business with you, but happy enough from doing so that they encourage others to do the same. He didn’t stop there, either; he led two sessions later in the day that drilled even deeper into modern customer engagement strategy, and both were spot-on. His first had him and his team demonstrating how the Siebel CRM family is helping Oracle customers find their way in social CRM via cross-channel, experience-driven business practices. Very sharp. Then he put two powerhouses-Paul Greenberg and Denis Pombriant-together to discuss social CRM and cloud computing. A session with either Denis or Paul is always worth the time; both of them plus Anthony is more than most can hope for. The conversation was lively, though Anthony’s questions did seem (understandably) to support Oracle’s mostly-on-premises model. Regardless, Anthony Lye is everything Oracle needs in a CRM exec: he’s sharp, relatable, works well with the rest of his team, knows the industry, never forgets the customer, and is a pleasure to speak with. This man needs a raise.

More to come after today’s happenings, and I’ll try to post my thoughts in a more timely maner. No promises though; I still owe you my impressions of a great social CRM dinner I attended with Tealeaf last week revealing its latest customer experience survey results. Great stuff, and I want to do it justice, but I feel funny about the time delay.

So it’s shaping up to be a busy, if short, week. While I was busy absorbing and writing about the Oracle-InQuira announcement you read about yesterday, I nearly missed an announcement from Salesforce.com. (You can see the details of that news here, including a few of my comments on it.) And while I was tracking that down, RightNow Technologies snuck in a little bit of news of their own, to wit the acquisition of HiveLive.

I’d give you the lowdown on the RNOW news, but in addition to getting a handle on that, I need to prep for a social media marketing event here in New York hosted by Axciom.

Oy.

I’ll provide a summary after the crazy has settled to an acceptable level. Salesforce news = cool, RNOW news = smart (I think), Axciom event = informative (probably).

The embargo is up, so I can report on a little piece of news I got last week from Oracle. No less a personage than Anthony Lye (with the aid of Susie Penner, one of the best media/analyst relations people I’ve ever met) laid out the details of a partnership with InQuira to deliver an on-demand knowledge management system for customer service. It’s available now.

Oracle and Lye need no introduction. InQuira is a name I’ve encountered before, though the company’s claimed strength is in Web self-service. The partnership itself is not new, either—the two companies announced something similar last year at Oracle OpenWorld, but for on-premises deployments. Today’s announcement extends their work to SaaS.

To quote Oracle’s statement: “The integrated, on demand service solution enables customers to go seamlessly from self-service to live agent-assisted service. Service agents receive overall view of customer issues and actions taken, providing a consistent experience across Web, phone and community-based channels. … With InQuira knowledge management available on demand and embedded in the Oracle CRM On Demand desktop, customer service agents have access to knowledge across the enterprise, enabling them to seamlessly access answers right from within their normal service flow.” Thus, customers who are looking for help or other information encounter fewer bumps on the way up the support chain, while agents can respond more quickly and definitively to customer inquiries. There’s greater likelihood that answers will be consistent across all access points, and the user base’s expertise becomes part of the support mix.

I can’t say that this is a totally unique product—it’s an extension of an existing partnership to provide something similar, and service automation vendors have been working at solutions like this for a few years now—but it does have the stamp of two respected corporate names as well as the addition of SaaS. In my experience, it’s easier to create integrated service environments with smaller businesses, simply because there’s less knowledge to manage and less demand on the delivery channels. Oracle and InQuira working together have a fair chance of extending service integration to really large companies, where customers have previously found it very easy to get lost or confused. The reduced tech footprint of the SaaS option doesn’t hurt either, so companies who are willing and able to go this route should be well served.

Sounds good, right? I think so too, but to be honest I had a little trouble envisioning the structure of the partnership in terms of who brings what to the table and when it comes into play during a service engagement. I’ll be taking a follow-up briefing later today to see how it all works, and maybe get InQuira’s point of view on the partnership. Should anything new and awesome emerge from that call, I’ll update. For now, though, I like what I’ve heard.

It might not have been an “eventful” period since my last entry, but there are definitely a lot of things going on in the social media world—enough that I’ve been having some trouble narrowing down my thoughts to one topic. As such, I’ll touch on a number of different things, part-linkdump, part commentary.

More social media guidelines. I’m glad to see that Intel isn’t the only big company getting serious enough about social media engagement to codify its approach (see my previous post here). A recent post on FastForward Blog notes similar efforts by IBM, Sun, and RightNow. Thing 1: The FastForward writer says he was told RightNow’s guidelines were partly shaped by what Intel, IBM, and Sun had set down. Does this mean there’s already a second (or third, or 12th) generation of such corporate policies floating around for the public to see? I hope so. Thing 2: Oracle acquired Sun in April, after failing to reach terms with IBM. I wonder how the acquisition will affect Sun’s social policy, or for that matter Oracle’s.

A man and his brand. Last month (sorry, didn’t see it until a few days ago) filmmaker/author/Jersey boy Kevin Smith did some heavy Q&A for readers of Decider before a live appearance. You can read it here. (NSFW if you’re not allowed to read profanity, or if a guy who answers questions while smoked up is against company policy. I pity those who fit this description.) Say what you want about Kevin Smith (I dig him), this is a guy who really understands himself, his audience, and his industry. He understands it better than major studios who think viral marketing can be made to order and posted to the MySpace and put into the YouTubes. This is a successful creator who knows where he’s from, and what created his fan following, and stays in touch with it without pandering to it. His answer to the third question sums it up well:

Many celebrities seem to guard every shed of privacy they can get their hands on, yet you have always been a very accessible public figure. With a SModcast, a blog, your Evenings With series, and a Twitter, your life seems to be an open book. What drives you to let people into your life in such an intimate way?

I don’t know any other way to be, really. Once media was created that allowed a dialogue to open between filmmakers and audience, there was no way I couldn’t embrace it. This is a communications medium, film. We do this to get a reaction and hear what people have to say about our work. It’s enormously flattering when someone (or lots of someones) are interested in you enough as an artist to wanna know about your life and opinions beyond the actual work that brought you to their attention in the first place. [...]

Kevin Smith is his own successful brand, and he got that way by never trying to be a brand, or be anything other than what he is: a comic-book fan, a regular guy, a sarcastic observer of what he grew up around. I’m not saying that a manufacturer of backed abrasives can have the same ease in relating to its customers, but it’s an ideal to consider whenever social CRM is on the table.

A duel of trust. As our online relationships become broader and more diffuse, we’re starting to ask who we can trust. It’s not surprising that surveys are being conducted on just that topic, nor is it surprising that different sources are getting different answers. The Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey (via Adweek) says trust of consumer reviews and opinions—other than those of personally-known individuals—is at 70 percent. The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report, however, says there is “strong to complete distrust” of anonymous consumer reviews, and only about 33 percent trust of online friends’ recommendations. That’s an awfully wide chasm to bridge. To be fair, though, in the Razorfish report 86 percent of respondents say that “whom they trust is dependent on the type of product.” I don’t imagine a war between these opposing points of view, but trust is an important issue that we need to make sure stays current. I’d say it’s more important to figure out what creates trust than to identify its strongest locii, but that route opens the possibility of manipulating trust—something businesses are often all too willing to try. See this New York Times column by Bob Herbert for an idea of what I mean.

Update 1: Shortly after writing this, I came across the 2009 Edelman Trust Barometer. (PDF link.) It’s a bit more general than the two above, but still quite valuable. Thanks to Prem Kumar Aparanji (@prem_k) and Josh Weinberger (@kitson) for the tip.

Update 2: Also shortly after writing this, I realized I’d left out my take on the United Airlines broken guitar saga. I’ll save that for my next post.

That’s all for now. Keep an ear open for the next podcast of Paul Greenberg and Brent Leary as the CRM Playaz. It’s coming soon, and these two are always on point and entertaining. No link yet, but Paul’s pretty reliable about putting linkage on his ZDNet blog.