Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Perception is Reality

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, there is little doubt you’ve read something or at least had a conversation with somebody about CRM, CEM or VOC. Not familiar with all these acronyms? They stand for Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Customer Experience Management (CEM) and Voice of Customer (VOC). Simply stated, all of these areas focus on some aspect of understanding your customer’s wants and needs and then adjusting business practices to ensure you can deliver on those expectations. It seems simple enough...why all the hype?

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Performance Tuning according to Yahoo!

A few days ago, Yahoo! released YSlow, a free Firefox add-on integrated with Firebug built to analyze Web pages and tell you why they’re slow, according to the Yahoo! Developer Network. The Firefox Web browser and some of its helpful add-ons like the Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug can be used to quickly dissect a Web site. With the addition of YSlow, you can get a quick heads-up on speeding up your site.

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Monday, July 30, 2007

The U.S. Is Still Winning The Brand Olympics

The U.S. is home to over half of the top 100 brands in the world, and also 14 of the top 20 brands. See the Business Week list here. Google’s brand value increased the most over the last year: +44%! Ford decreased the most since the 2006 rankings: -19%.

There are also some interesting stories behind brand growth at Business Week’s Best Brands Special Report.

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The Web 2.0 Meme Reaches Maturity

It has been nearly two years now since Tim O’Reilly posed the question ”What is Web 2.0?” and introduced many to the Web 2.0 meme. Since then there has been much debate about what constitutes Web 2.0, and even if the concept is meaningful.

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Predicting Potter and Consoles

Two public prediction markets have recently reached their end: June game console sales and the question “Will Harry Potter survive the Deathly Hallows?”

What makes comparing the results of these two markets interesting is the different type of question they are predicting.  In the case of the console market, they are attempting to predict the buying habits of a large group of people as well as the production capacity and marketing moves of large companies.  On the other hand, the Harry Potter market is attempting to predict the creative whims of a single person (J.K. Rowling).

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