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Experiencing Information Overload? 5 Tools for Staying Relevant

By Amy Hawthorne December 27, 2010

Wouldn’t it be nice if every time you logged on to your computer you had a button pop up with any and all content that is relevant to you?

Information comes online faster than ever before. Is it relevant to you? Is it information you need? How do you know it’s even out there if you aren’t listening?

Relevance describes how pertinent, connected, or applicable something is to a given matter. A thing is relevant if it serves as a means to a given purpose. – Wikipedia

Filtering IN relevant content is going to be the only way to stay on top of your game. Here’s a few things I’m using to ensure I don’t miss out on anything I need or want to know -

Google Reader – it’s easy, its free and its how I’m keeping up with thought leaders
Tweetdeck – LOVE being able to filter on keywords and company names.
iGoogle – I use it for news widgets and other personal stuff like – Spanish word a the day (I want to be bilingual so bad!), ESPN updates, Digg top news, and cool recipes.
Workstreamer – (of course!) we’re using our own product to keep up with prospects, partners and competitors. The Linkedin updates, Twitter tone cloud and multiple news stories on a given announcement are awesome. Business professionals no longer have to sift through pages and pages of content.
And with last week’s announcement, I’m now looking forward to seeing what and how @MassRelevance is going to help us even further filter Twitter.

How are you ensuring you are relevant? What tools are you using to ensure you don’t missing anything important?

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TOPICS: business listening, new information economy

Having the Relevant Business Information Needed to Act

By Suaad Sait December 20, 2010

Last week we talked about Sales being a team sport. They are no longer the “sales team,” they are part of YOUR team. Sales is the driving force of company – it’s how we make money. Sales awareness and acquiring and sharing business information that helps spur new business is becoming and more a priority for more than just the sales department.

It’s not just about availability of information and increased collaboration, however. Sales 2.0 is also about the ability and authority to make actual decisions at the point of insight. It’s one thing to know, and it’s quite another to act.

As a recent Gartner report projected, by 2012, 35 percent of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets. That’s pretty bad – just having the right information puts you ahead of the class.

But on top of that, Gartner anticipates that by 2012, collaborative tools being deployed by savvy salesforces and companies will also have enabled a shift of traditional management decisions further down the chain as cross-communication and business information becomes more targeted, relevant and useful. I’m thinking salesforce.com might have read this same report….Chatter and now ChatterFree….

What Gartner is saying is that this is an evolve-or-die situation, in no uncertain terms. Non-hierarchical processes will win. You need to have the right information, and have the authority to wield it.

But that’s scary, right?

What makes such a paradigm shift less intimidating is, again, precise, useful and readily-available information and contextual awareness not only for sales professionals, but also, importantly, for the entire openly collaborative and communicating company — across departments and hierarchies.

Well-informed roles will make well-informed decisions. The reason the kinds hierarchies Gartner critiques have existed until now is because information had always been concentrated at the top.

Now, the right business information can be made available to everyone, democratically, with one-click tools that deliver up-to-date information at the point of a decision.

For example, a sales professional may be working on successfully closing a deal with a prospective customer, but accounting could have awareness of that customer’s problematic credit history, or a recent financial filing signaling distress. As sales professionals focus on moving the flood of productive leads through the funnel, that kind of information which may not be available to them directly is crucial in indentifying the deals that can most doggedly pursued, and it needs to be communicated across the company.

Likewise, a sales professional could be courting a customer that HR realizes a new employee used to work with, a connection that may valuable in closing the deal. An awareness of the activities across departments becomes essential, a shared business intelligence that isn’t confined to individuals but made useful throughout the company.

The right listening and business information platforms are key to establishing and effectively fostering a culture of sales as team sport, with informed and empowered roles that are authorized to make real decisions and thereby meaningfully move the needle on closing deals.

Do you know who is one the “HOT” deal list at your company right now? Are you sitting on information that could accelerate a WIN?

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TOPICS: business intelligence, new information economy, sales intelligence, social business

3 Tools for Listening to your Customers

By Suaad Sait August 18, 2010

We spend a lot of time at here at Workstreamer talking about listening to the social graph. Our product is designed to let our users hear the heartbeat of insight related to the companies that matter most to them. But how should we be listening to our customers? As our user-base grows quickly, I’m spending an increasing amount of time talking with users about their likes, dislikes, and ideas. I’ve also been reviewing different technology solutions that will help us listen to our customers.

Here are three tools that I have been studying; learning how they can help me listen to customers.

In years past, I’ve been a part of several help desk tool implementations. Generally, they were rather expensive boxed software products, and we had to hire consultants to help us deploy them. We’d have dedicated IT resources to manage them as well. Even with all that infrastructure and attention, it was sometimes a struggle to actually connect with customers.

Zen Desk is the help desk re-imagined. First, it is completely web based, with no IT overhead required. You can probably get it up and running in 15 minutes, and it comes pre-populated with web-forms and works with my email system. We can easily start building a knowledge base from existing email and voice exchanges with customers.

Zen Desk also supplies some sizzle in the form of an iphone app. This app allows our customer support team to respond to issues on the go.

From a cost perspective, Zen Desk is quite reasonable. The most popular plan runs $24 per month per customer support agent.

Started by University of Texas graduate Lane Becker, Get Satisfaction is a super-social mix of customer feedback tool and community idea generation discussion-board. While Zen Desk tends to favor 1:1 interaction, Get Satisfaction is all about building a community of customers around their support issues and product ideas.

You can see our Workstreamer customer community under development at http://community.workstreamer.com/. You can also share an idea, ask a question, log a problem or give us praise directly by clicking on the “Feedback” tab on the left side of the Workstreamer app. A reasonable starting price point for Get Satisfaction is $89 per month.

Moving from support to sales brings us to Bazaarvoice. If you are looking for a tool to listen to what your customers are saying about your products, and then harness and purpose those comments to drive increased sales, Bazaarvoice is without peer.

Over the last 5 years, Bazaarvoice implementations have served more than 100B pieces of content. This content was originally generated by customers giving opinions on products and services. By listening to those statements and creating a work flow process that harvests the best content and serves it in a manner that can influence buyer behavior, Bazaarvoice has created a powerhouse solution that is changing the way companies are being perceived online.

Bazaarvoice is headquartered right here in Austin, we are proud to share our city (and our venture capitalists) with them. Their software is definitely enterprise class with pricing starting at $2000 per month.

As we grow our community, we are focused on listening to our customers. By doing so we will be able to innovate new services that will allow Workstreamer customers to listen to what matters most to them. If you haven’t already done so, please give Worksteamer at try and give us feedback – we are listening!

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TOPICS: business listening, new information economy, social business

The Art of Listening

By Suaad Sait August 5, 2010

“Most of the successful people I’ve known are the ones who do more listening than talking.” – Bernard M. Baruch

In my mind, Listening is both an art and a science. We have tools-a-plenty that provide the “science” of listening. Yammer, LinkedIn, Workstreamer and Quora are all excellent platforms for listening for insight of one type or another to name just a few.

Recently, I’ve been focused on trying to develop a set of behaviors that will allow me to get maximum value from the time I spend listening.

Time spent Listening

Although I consume lots of information during the day, I don’t consider most of it “Listening”. Listening means tracking a stream of information flow that can yield high value insight – but only when that insight is non-obvious in the context of that information stream.

For example, content directed at me specifically (emails, conversations, phone calls, texts) do not represent listening opportunities. In those scenarios, I’m explicitly supposed to get the context. If I can’t figure it out, it is the fault of the sender. I shouldn’t have to be artistic in my interpretation.

Another example of non-listening is one-way mass media. Television is a terrible place to try to listen for insight. If everyone is hearing it, it’s not worth listening to.

Listening to understand what matters

The Art of Listening certainly revolves around understanding what matters. I have a twitter feed for references to my company. The other day someone by the name of Jarrett tweeted a complaint about content on our home page. My first reaction was to restructure the content to remove the offending video. But I’ve heard how much people like the introductory video before. What’s going on? Looking at the Jarrett’s twitter feed, I discovered that he was a frequent user of our products but that he did not realize that there was a better way to log into our site rather than making his way through the splash page each time. Link provided – problem solved.

Listening for the scoop

There is nothing better than finding a diamond in the rough through the Art of Listening. So much that passes by is old news or fluff. But occasionally you can catch a scoop before the crowd discovers it, and use that to your advantage. The key is to be sure you are listening to the feeds that insight might originate in. Call me geeky, but I like to listen to job postings from prospect companies and from competitors. At my previous company, I saw a job posting advertising for someone with a skill set in our company’s product. And we hadn’t sold anything to that company yet. Bingo! I also like to see what kinds of job requirements are listed on our competitor’s job postings. Just a little window into their product, technology and strategies.

Listening for the back-story

One of my favorite listening posts currently is a website called Quora. While Quora falls into the Question and Answer site genre, it has done a fantastic job in attracting extremely knowledgeable experts around many subjects that I am interested in. I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to learn about the key decisions that successful software company executives made early in their companies. Quora is a perfect place to listen for those kinds of back-stories. A recent question posted was: What was PayPal’s most important strategic decision early on in achieving widespread customer adoption? And sure enough, several answers we provided by some of the earliest and most successful Pay Pal executives.

Understanding where you can hear the real back-story, find the scoop, or figure out what really matters are all key aspects of the Art of Listening.

Where and what are you listening to? And, how much of it is noise vs. information you can act on?

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TOPICS: business listening, new information economy, sales intelligence

Drowning in a Fire Hose of Information

By Suaad Sait July 28, 2010

“This steady and undissipated attention to one object, is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind.” – Lord Chesterfield, 1740

I have a nagging feeling that I am being overwhelmed by data. Some days at work I feel like I am trying to drink from a fire hose. It seems like the information being presented to me is so frequent and of such richness, than I am having a hard time making sense of it.

So, I decided to add it all up! How many different pieces of data am I exposed to on a daily basis? Mind you, I’m talking about data in the aggregate sense. 1 email = 1 piece of data. As does one tweet, one magazine article, one advertisement on TV, one conversation with a co-worker and so on.

Here is what I came up with for the past 24 hours:

Emails Received	138
Tweets reviewed	422
Facebook postings glanced at	31
Conversations with live people	29
Phone calls	6
TV shows watched	4
Advertisements exposed to	75
Magazine/ Newspaper articles read	10
Texts read	8
Web pages perused	222
Documents reviewed	15
Total Data Points	960

Nearly 1000 data points in one day! No wonder my brain feels tired all the time. I wish I had a time series of data measuring my data consumption over the last decade. I bet that the total data points have grown by at least 100%.

This fire hose of information is really becoming a distraction as well. I’ll start off focused on getting an item accomplished and before you know it I have wasted 20 minutes following some click-stream of seemingly relevant information, only to find myself studying something totally unrelated to the problem at hand.

According to Wikipedia’s article on Short-term memory, my brain’s short-term memory capacity is 7 plus or minus 2 items at any given time. If that is truly the case, that explains quite a bit. My typical meandering path through Internet research generally takes more than 7 steps – so it’s no wonder that I frequently lose focus on what I originally was researching.

Studies of multitasking are even worse. Brain scans made of test subjects during multitasking show how incapable we are. Everything thing from inhibiting learning to “response selection bottlenecks” can be blamed on too much information being consumed too quickly.

The net of all this research is that our always-on internet and it’s fire hose of information are contributing to a decrease in productivity and are a substantial cause of concern for the knowledge worker.

Don’t drink from the hose, sip from it’s stream of insight

At the end of the day, my information consumption methods are unsustainable. I simply can’t remain productive while my exposure to information doubles with each iteration of Moore’s law.

My plan is to avoid the fire hose and to sip from a stream of insight: A stream that will be automatically curated from the hose. This curation process of picking the best and most relevant bits of information from the stream and presenting those bits in context to what I am working on is the new target for information management tools.

Another Lord Chesterfield quote explains our efforts at Workstreamer: “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” We hope you will join us on our journey of turning information in insight.

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TOPICS: business intelligence, business listening, its all about the data, new information economy

Are you able to listen – analyze – decide – act – adjust?

By Hank Weghorst July 20, 2010

When it comes to war, the battles being fought by today’s military are not unlike the battles that many large corporations are fighting. Each faces an ever shifting enemy of insignificant strength in the traditional sense, that has the power to project it’s force in unexpected ways. Today’s army has vastly superior tools, training, and information gathering capabilities, and yet still finds itself in an asymmetric environment, struggling to win hearts and minds.

One of the key challenges that strategic decision-makers face is analysis paralysis. So much information is available pointing to so many different choices, that your organization can take months to identify a problem, more months to identify the strategy, yet months again to implement, and finally even more months to determine if your strategy worked. A year from now, you may (or may not) have fixed the problems that you are facing today.

Analysis paralysis can lead to poor decision-making and missed opportunities and it has the potential to let your smaller or more nimble competition win. Examples abound of missed opportunities by large corporations. Nimble players have been disrupting the Fortune 500 in manufacturing, technology, finance, healthcare, consulting, and just about any other vertical that you care to name.

Understanding how to empower smaller groups to operate autonomously, make decisions at the local level and consistently win small victories is a hallmark of today’s military training. These same lessons can and should be applied to corporate strategy groups.

John Boyd was a USAF Fighter Pilot and military strategist whose work on shortening the decision-making cycle during combat has had profound impact on military, and then corporate strategists. Boyd’s key concept was that of the decision cycle or OODA Loop, the process by which an entity (either an individual or an organization) reacts to an event. According to this idea, the key to victory is to be able to create situations wherein one can make appropriate decisions more quickly than one’s opponent.

Boyd hypothesized that all organizations undergo a continuous cycle of interaction with their environment. This is broken down to four interrelated and overlapping processes through which they cycle continuously:

Observation: the collection of data by means of the senses (“listening”)
Orientation: the analysis and synthesis of data to form one’s current mental perspective
Decision: the determination of a course of action based on one’s current mental perspective
Action: the physical playing-out of decisions

Of course, while this is taking place, the situation may be changing so the organization with the most adaptable “listening” strategy paired with the quickest analysis and decision process can “get inside” the OODA loop of the competition.

Boyd theorized that all large organizations possessed a hierarchy of OODA loops at tactical and strategic levels and he showed that most effective organizations have a highly decentralized chain of command that utilizes objective-driven orders rather than method-driven orders in order to harness the mental capacity and creative abilities of individual leaders at each level.

Being able to listen to the marketplace in real-time, analyze the noise for actionable information, and then react is a skill that every corporation must develop in the near term. The competition is gunning for you. Are you able to listen – analyze – decide – act – adjust – repeat? Can you get inside the OODA loop of your competition? It all starts by listening.

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TOPICS: business intelligence, business listening, new information economy

The Battle Comes to Your Company – Are you Armed and Ready?

By Hank Weghorst July 19, 2010

Corporate America is at war. Large organizations are under attack from every direction, and in many cases business strategists are losing the battle of information supremacy. Not because they can’t get the info they need – but rather because they are drowning in too much information and not enough insight.

Nearly three quarters of a century ago, in 1937, noted economist Ronald Coase penned a short essay titled “The Nature of the Firm”. He was trying to understand why companies had gotten very large as the industrial revolution displaced our pre-20^th Century agrarian lifestyles.

Since the dawn of civilization, we had lived in tribes. We survived as small groups of highly connected individuals. If we lived in the farming village of the 19^th century, I’d help you build your barn, and you would help me build mine. Together, we would thrive or suffer based on our collective success without much involvement at all from external forces.

But by the beginning of the 20^th Century, that had all changed. Industrialization was driving the birth of the corporation, and then the mega-corporation. By the 1930’s energy, transportation, finance and consumer goods companies were pulling millions of works off the fields and into the factories. Why did these companies become so large?

Coase discovered that the size of the firm is correlated to the cost of information. When we were all farmers, the amount of information we needed (small), and the cost of getting it (low) allowed our “enterprise” to be tiny. In the auto industry of the 1930’s (not to mention energy of the 1970’s or finance in the 1990’s) the amount of information needed to succeed and the cost to obtain it was substantial. It was this high cost of information that drove the existence of a formal top-down decision making structure that still exists in many companies today.

What few expected merely a decade ago was the emergence of a force that would throw Coase’s law into reverse, and change the game in the necessary complexity and size of the firm. The power of the internet is now driving down the cost of information to the point where almost everything you need to effectively compete in the marketplace can be obtained from your browser and procured at almost no cost.

As business strategists, many of us are stuck in systems that are tuned for expensive information. While we are dealing with complex processes, massive data sets, and painful authoritarian structures, the modern competition can be nimble, cheap and open.

In the battle for insight supremacy, thinking and acting like Special Forces may make the difference between victory and defeat for our corporation.

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TOPICS: business intelligence, business listening, its all about the data, new information economy

Are we in a Social Recovery?

By Hank Weghorst July 9, 2010

A funny thing happened on the way to recovery.

Markets rise and fall and rise again. The global recession that we are finally shaking followed a familiar trend. 16 times since 1919, our economy has faced recession and experienced follow-on growth. From a peak of nearly 14000 in 2007, the Dow Jones retreated to nearly half its value in early 2009. Then, as sure as spring arrives; the markets began their march ahead – reaching 11,000 by mid-April 2010.

What exactly is a recession? According to my notes from Econ 101, it represents 2 consecutive quarters of negative GDP. Our current recession technically started 3Q 2008, although experts point to the end of 2007 as the “real” start.

While this recession has lead to a malaise in the general economy, there is one group of firms that have bucked the trend: Companies that deliver value around the Social Web. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Foursquare represent a new breed of service that were launched or grew through their formative stages during the downturn and have accelerated even faster as the recovery has evolved.

Lets look a little closer. Since March 13^th 2009, barely a year ago, the market has increased by 53%.

Facebook, which launched in 2004 and reached critical mass during the slide, saw growth in unique visitors that virtually parallels that of the stock market’s recovery during that timeframe.

Foursquare, a social mobile application that tracks your “check-ins”, launched in early 2009 has grown dramatically with the recovery.

And Twitter, which launched in 2008, has grown at an almost identical rate to the Dow Jones Industrial Average over its life.

So what do these trends mean?

One of the key traits that these services have in common is that they are largely consumer focused. While consumer debt was piling up, jobs drying up, and the housing market cratered, consumers were turning in droves to the social web to keep them connected, entertained, and happy. Business to Consumer social technologies appear to be a leading indicator for recovery this time around.

It’s been long understood across those 16 recessions, that consumer sentiment drives recovery. Once consumers decide it is time to buy, business spending must pick up.

And so as social consumer applications have dominated the last few years, social business apps (apps leveraging the social concepts and constructs) may dominate the recovery. Perhaps we need to christen this recovery, the first “Social Recovery” in history.

For example, B2B social site LinkedIn saw hockey stick like growth in 2009 and this year as business networking and hiring picks up. Business collaboration tool Yammer has taken the Twitter business model to corporate messaging. And its still yet to be seen how salesforce.com Chatter will change the way we do business.

It appears that the most successful tools that drive reach and collaboration within the business ecosystem (customers, partners, vendors, competitors, prospects, clients etc) have a good shot of riding the recovery. I’m expecting established apps like LinkedIn, Yammer, Spiceworks and new apps like Salesforce.com’s “Chatter” to grow and dominate the new business software scene.

What do you think? Whatever the outcome, the next couple years of recovery are sure to be a wild ride.

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TOPICS: its all about the data, new information economy, social business

This is NOT your Father’s Information Economy

By Suaad Sait June 24, 2010

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other. – Stewart Brand, at the first Hackers Convention, 1984.

These days, information is everywhere. There are millions of blogs and billions of posts on Facebook. Wikipedia is growing faster than you can read it and every traditional magazine and newspaper has a hundred competitors online. No – this is surely not your father’s information economy. Things were very different back then.

In 1937, economist Ronald Coase wrote his seminal article titled “The Nature of The Firm” in which he argued that the size of the corporation is correlated with the cost of information. Large firms had evolved to dominate the 20^th century economy because the cost of getting the information necessary to conduct business successfully was so expensive. Massively hierarchal organizations – the rise of middle management – were a direct result of this effect.

In the mid-Twentieth Century, information analysis was performed much like auto manufacturing. A large assembly line of white-collar workers pushed information up the pyramid – analyzing, augmenting and combining as it went. Once decisions were made at the top, a reverse process occurred as the “insight” was pushed down and out to the far reaches of the enterprise. It was nearly impossible to change course in a large firm because of the rigid and massive information gathering, management, and decision-making infrastructure.

Fast forward to the web-enabled world. With so many new “sources” of information, you’d think the costs to generate insight would become astronomical, right? Well not for the agile enterprise. With the right tools, the cost of capturing and analyzing the right information can be exceedingly cheap. So cheap, in fact, that Coase’s Law can been flipped on it’s head.

The first generation of mainstream information aggregation tools for the web were the Internet directories – remember Yahoo when it was just a directory? (Am I dating myself??) We found information online by hunting through directory structures – just like a card catalog.

Then came search and exotic names like Alta Vista and Inktomi and then Google. Information access exploded, as did our ability to sift through it. Now we are in the third wave of information aggregation with the convergence of social, real-time and mobile information overwhelming our previously reliable search and research strategies.

This “RealSocialMobile” web calls for a new strategy for information aggregation. Rather than expecting traditional search technologies to yield optimal results, we now must turn to tools that provide a federated approach to information retrieval and insight analysis.

In 1991, Ronald Coase was finally awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on the Nature of the Firm. His work points us toward a world where information is everywhere, and information is free. This paradigm of cheap and effective services that listen to the pulse of the real-time web and automatically identify the nuggets of insight that are directly relevant to your specific needs will soon be changing the face of business. Jump on now and enjoy the ride.

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TOPICS: business listening, new information economy, social business