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Innovation

Three Companies that Started down the Trust Path with Customers First

They do it by talking about and engaging with topics and content that will make their customers smarter. Or they share tidbits that are fun and engaging, and share the love. These are the secrets of successful corporate blogs - and ...READ»

Five Companies that Fix their Story to Inspire Service

Branding as a strategy means little if the customer experience is not there. If your story doesn’t align with what you do, all of the clever tactics you can come up with to follow your lofty goal will not make the cut.Unless you can ...READ»

Would CPG Brands Compete with their Own Channels for Customers?

AdAge writes an interesting article about going beyond online ads to eCommerce opportunities for CPG brands. Will it pay off? Services are easier to deliver online. A few product dot-bombs in the early 2000s made us keenly aware of ...READ»

Customer Issues and the Bottom Line

Many marketers spend a considerable amount of time calculating the ROI of campaigns by looking at cost per lead (CPL) or Web conversion numbers. You are probably quite smart yourself to the ways of lead nurturing and its importance in ...READ»

Innovation and Failure

There is a good relationship between innovation and failure. As Monica Harrington shares, Microsoft Bob gave plenty of very smart people a run for their money - and lessons to take to their next project.   Those are familiar ...READ»

Mad Men and Trust Agents

They’re at the opposite ends of the conversation spectrum. The show context is that of media and advertising, two areas that are undergoing rapid change - some would call it a decline. Mad Men captivated the public’s imagination ...READ»

Fluency in Customer Conversation is a Key Business Driver

There is a reason why this publication is called Fast Company. The US has an even shorter attention span than many places I’ve had the fortune of spending time in. I’ve been writing about customer conversation here for more than ...READ»

How to Give Your Company Service Deadlines

Usually it’s the customers who give you deadlines - and sometimes ultimatums - on service. Needing something done by, support within “x” time, service at “y” time and place. What would happen if you turned that concept on ...READ»

How you can get the Most out of Customer Service

We spend so much time talking about how to improve customer service that I thought one post on how to improve customer attitude would be time well spent. If you think about it, we call a customer support line only when we have a ...READ»

How to Map to the Social Media Engagement Profile of Your Customers

You probably already know that Forrester’s social technographics profile can help you analyze the social profile of your customer base. As authors Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li explain in the book Groundswell, people increasingly use ...READ»

How to Answer the Social Phone

It seems that if there are many ways to listen in the social Web, there are also many reasons with the ways to answer. Tom Asacker puts it well, we define ourselves both according to what we identify with and what we reject, and given ...READ»

A Hacker School That Helps Solve Silicon Valley's Hiring Problem

Tech companies can't find enough engineers. So why not train them yourself? For free. And then make $20K a pop on recruiting fees.READ»

Inside INTERPOL's New Cybercrime Innovation Center

INTERPOL, the international policing agency, is opening a massive innovation center in Singapore in 2014. At the center, law enforcement will learn all about the latest cybercrimes... and have access to cutting-edge forensics laboratories and research stations.READ»

Why Facebook's Daily Active Users Is Not The Number That Matters

A fracas emerges over the fact that not all daily Facebook users visit the company's website. Advertisers tell us why that's missing the point.READ»

How Lego's Great Adventure In Geek-Sourcing Snapped Into Place And Boosted The Brand

A second product from Lego's crowdsourced Cuusoo project--the Japanese asteroid reconnaissance spacecraft Hayabusa--is scheduled for release on March 2. The venerable toy company may never be the same.READ»

3 Things That Will Change After Facebook's IPO, And 2 Things That Won't

Once Facebook goes public, the party's over, right? Less innovation and more kowtowing to Wall Street, no? Maybe. Then again, maybe not.READ»

Fast Talk: How A Former Google Exec Plans To Transform Loans

Meet Douglas Merrill, Google's former Chief Information Officer, whose loan-giving startup ZestCash makes FICO scores seem straight outta the Stone Age. "All data is credit data," he says--and the insight is helping America's "underbanked" legions.READ»

Mind This, Gap: Online-Only American Giant Brings Clothes Manufacturing Back To The U.S.

The former head of Chrome Bags, Bayard Winthrop, thinks he can build a menswear brand to rival Gap and J.Crew by skipping the brick-and-mortar route.READ»

Salesforce's Desk.com Turns Any Employee Anywhere Into A Customer Support Ace

Desktop software is sold "by the seat." But a "by the hour" pricing structure offered by cloud-based apps means smaller businesses can put everyone on customer support--even the CEO or the weird guy clinging to his red stapler.READ»

Here's Why You Should Care (A Lot) About The Supreme Court's GPS Ruling

You might not be suspected of trafficking cocaine and your car might not have a warrantless GPS placed in it by police. But the legal issues raised by the Supreme Court matter for everything you do online (and off).READ»