Late last week, I had the unfortunate privilege of having one of my wisdom teeth extracted due to it being partially impacted and entirely painful. The procedure itself didn’t scare me much. Rather, it was the post-operative care and trying to avoid dry socket — which can take root in the gaping hole left after the tooth is removed — that gave me pause.

Now, I had a 6:30 p.m. appointment last Thursday to get the procedure done. Obviously I was there by 6:15 p.m. — this shouldn’t be much of a shock to anyone. Now, being that this dentist office is like virtually any other medical office, I expected to wait in the chair for approximately 30 minutes. Things happen, and for whatever reason, the medical profession seems to think its fair to penalize you for being late even though they are almost never on time. Go figure.

The clock turns 6:45, and I’m listening to a news program on the television while playing Brickbreaker on my BlackBerry. No matter; I was expecting this. Then, 7 p.m. comes around — 7:15, 7:20 — you get the picture.

Now, I’m all alone in the operating room tweeting my displeasure and messaging my friend who was waiting to take me back to my apartment after the procedure. By the time it was 8 p.m., I was ready to rip out other people’s teeth, let alone my own. No one had come by to tell me what was going on.

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Karen Adler is a small business owner, an award-winning cook, author, and a BBQ Queen. She also happens to be my aunt. Adler owns her own cookbook publishing company, Pig Out Publications, based in Kansas City, Missouri and she and partner Judith Fertig travel the country offering tips on grilling and outdoor cuisine. The crowned “BBQ Queens” have been in the limelight for the past decade. From book signings to TV spots, they are extremely busy.

During a weekend trip home to Kansas City, the “BBQ Capital of the World,” I sat down with my aunt and, in conversation, mentioned a few social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. “I know I need to have a presence on those sites, but I just don’t have the time or the know-how,” my aunt told me.  Then a light bulb went off. Why not have me help her with the Facebook and email marketing stuff? Of course I accepted. To me, putting my aunt on Facebook and helping her establish a social presence is fun. For her, it’s a chore.

To my surprise, Adler knows a lot about social networking. She gets the basic premise and pointed me to companies that she thinks do a nice job of marketing themselves on the Web. She said it’s something she’s thought about for the past year or so — but just hasn’t gotten around to. With a new cookbook out in bookstores and with BBQ season in full swing, it’s no wonder that she has gotten a little sidetracked. She’s busy putting out daily business fires — no pun intended. Adler also said she’s afraid of going about it the wrong way. She showed me her Facebook profile that she had set up one day, but hadn’t yet uploaded a photo or any profile information. She’s not sure where to start.

I said I would help my aunt under one condition: She learns Facebook, Twitter, and email marketing herself. I’m happy to get her up and running, but from here on out, she needs to be the one communicating with fans on Facebook and developing the content for her newsletters. She knows her business — not me. I’m excited to see firsthand how “getting social” will affect my aunt’s business. I already have grandiose dreams of her, in real time, walking Twitter followers through steps to marinading pork chops. I’m imagining her BBQ events circling Facebook with hundreds of attendees. Pig Out Publications could find fans and followers that it would have never reached had it not been for social networking. We’re going to smart small, but it doesn’t hurt to dream, right?

For all of you small business owners out there, do you share a similar mindset when it comes to social? You know it’s important, but how are you finding the time? What has helped you overcome fears and hesitations to eventually dive into the social landscape?

Jessica Tsai is still in San Jose, Calif., but she’s moved on from the 3rd International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (her Twitter feed from that conference can be found here (Day 1) and here (Day 2), and her destinationCRM.com news story — “How Online Social Networking Explains Offline Social Behavior” – is here).

She’s now covering the Where 2.0 conference on geolocation, and we’ve collected a lightly edited selection of her live-twittering below.

More info can be found at the conference’s own Twitter channel, @where20. The hashtag for the conference seems open for debate, but tweets from other Where 2.0 attendees can be found at this Summize link w/combined results. (combining both #where20 and #where2.0 hashtags).

 

Wed May 20 09:10            At Where 2.0, first speaker: “Reality Mining for Companies: How Social Networks Network Best,” Alex “Sandy” Pentland

Wed May 20 09:33            Now Speaking: Lieutenant Sean Maday, Intelligence Officer, “Project Intersect” 

Wed May 20 09:49           Lior Ron, Steven Lee (Google) “The Evolving Geoweb”

Wed May 20 11:08           Michael Halbherr (Nokia), Christof Hellmis (Nokia gate5 GmbH), “Mobiles Around the World” 

Wed May 20 11:18            “Junk Mail and the GeoWeb Shine Light on New Orleans Recovery” Denice Ross & James Fee (RSP Architects)

Wed May 20 11:35            “Innovation Through Open Location,” Tyler Bell (Yahoo! Inc.) 

Wed May 20 11:56            “Maps in Four Dimensions,” Brandon Martin-Anderson (Urban Mapping) 

Wed May 20 13:39            “Tricky Issues With Local Search,” Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Land) 

Wed May 20 13:50            “Beyond Maps – The Hyperlocal Experience,” Mark Law (MapQuest) 

Wed May 20 14:07            “Footstreams: Clickstreams for the Physical World,” Jeff Holden (Pelago, Inc.) 

Wed May 20 14:24             “Wild Style City: Breaking the Clean Reality of the Virtual World,” Anthony Fassero (earthmine, inc) 

Wed May 20 14:34            “Wearable Sensory Substitution Devices for Navigation,” John Zelek (University of Waterloo) 

Wed May 20 14:51            “Decoding the Urban DNA and Harnessing the Power of Social Intelligence,” Greg Skibiski (Sense Networks) 

Wed May 20 14:58            “Realizing Spatial Intelligence on the GeoWeb,” Jack Dangermond (ESRI) 

Wed May 20 15:14            Panel Discussion: “Local Search: Funding Geo” -  
                                               Danny Sullivan (SE Land), Tyler Bell (Yahoo! Inc.), Michael Halbherr (Nokia),
                                               Marc Prioleau (CloudMade), Mark Law (MapQuest)

Wed May 20 16:28            “Red State, Blue State: Election Maps at The New York Times,” Matthew Ericson (New York Times) 

Wed May 20 16:42            “Putting a New Spin on Lidar Imaging,” Bruce Hall (Velodyne Acoustics, Inc.), Rick Yoder (Velodyne Lidar) 

Wed May 20 16:57            “Windows 7 – Location Awareness Made Easy,” Alec Berntson (programmer, Microsoft)

Wed May 20 17:10            Panel Discussion: “Mobile Reality” 
                                                    Raven Zachary (raven.me), Mok Oh (EveryScape Inc.), 
                                                    Will Carter (Nokia Research Center Hollywood)

Wed May 20 17:32            “DIY City: An Operating System for Cities,” John Geraci (DIYcity) 

Wed May 20 18:00            Final Session: “Where, When, Why, and How: Directions in Machine Learning and
                                                 Reasoning about Location,” Eric Horvitz (Microsoft)

 

 [The complete tweetstream, after the jump...]

Last week, I attended SAP and the Americas’ SAP User Group’s (ASUG) user conference, SAPPHIRE, in the friendly and extremely hot confines of Orlando, Fla. While I blogged, live tweeted, and wrote for the Web site about some of the key takeaways from the conference, there was a not-so-subtle lesson about customer service that I personally learned.

If you look up Type-A personality in the dictionary or, in my case, Wikipedia, you’ll probably find a picture of me. If not, you should. I like being early, having things done, and I can’t function without a to-do list nearby. I called a shuttle service the day before I was to fly back to CRM magazine’s world headquarters in Manhattan in order to arrange a pick-up from the Orange County Convention Center to Orlando International Airport.

Mind you, when I spoke to the customer service representative (CSR) at the time, she told me to be at a very specific location at a very specific time  — outside the North entrance between the two escalators at 3:50 p.m. OK. I also obtained a confirmation number, which turned out to be a lifesaver.

Fast forward to Wednesday afternoon at 3:40 p.m. Of course, I am outside in my designated location 10 minutes early on the off chance that the shuttle arrive early. I have the slip of paper with the confirmation number in my right hand, and in my left hand I have my mobile phone at the ready in case the shuttle doesn’t show up.

At 3:55 p.m. I see the shuttle coming around to my location. A small smile of relief took away the epic frustration I had for the shuttle being five minutes late. (Type-A? Me? Never …)

That smile was quickly turned upside down — again — as the shuttle slowed down slightly but didn’t bother to stop. The shuttle drove away, much to my chagrin and despite my waving frantically and yelling, “Right here!”

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As a bit of historical reference to complement Baseline Consulting partner and cofounder Jill Dyché’s guest-blogpost yesterday, we thought it might be useful to dig up an old Q+A with Siebel Systems founder Tom Siebel, conducted by our forebears here at CRM, way back in 2002.

It’s also worth remembering the days before cloud computing, software-as-a-service, and on-demand CRM — and the fact that they relied on now-disposed-of terms such as hosting, ASP (application service provider), and “the integrated enterprise.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same…

One key excerpt:

CRM: Do you believe the hosting model for CRM like the one promoted by Salesforce.com is a threat to vendors like Siebel?

Siebel: They’re not in my consideration as a competitor. I believe I have never encountered them competitively in nine years. And I am absolutely satisfied that they do not have a viable business model.

[More after the jump....]

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Continuing with Day 2 of the 3rd International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media in San Jose this week.

For tweets from other #AAAI / #ICWSM attendees, check the Summize results here. Follow Jessica’s tweets at http://twitter.com/jesstsai

Tue May 19 9:01:57    Speaking: Duncan Watts, Yahoo! Research, “Using the Web to do Social Science.”

Tue May 19 13:38:15   ”How does [system] design impact online community culture?” Panel Discussion

Tue May 19 15:05:13   Now Speaking: Tad Hogg, HP Labs, “Stochastic Models of User-Contributory Websites”

Tue May 19 15:31:42   Up Now: Christian Wolff, University of Regensburg, Germany, “Personal Information Mgmt vs. Resource Sharing”

Tue May 19 15:59:09   Next Up: Oded Nov, Polytechnic Insti. of NYU, “Motivational, Structural and Tenure Factors that Impact Online Community Photo Sharing

Tue May 19 16:55:57 Final Session: Michaela Götz, Cornell Univ., “Modeling Blog Dynamics”

[Details after the break...]

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[Jill Dyché, partner and cofounder at Baseline Consulting, filed the following dispatch from the road:]

I’ve just wrapped up my speaking tour with the MDM Forum, an eight-city seminar series sponsored by Informatica and Initiate Systems. At this past Thursday’s final event, in Dallas, I told the story of meeting Tom Siebel for the first time.

In 2001 I was in the throes of writing my second book, The CRM Handbook, and I decided to invite Siebel—who founded Siebel Systems, of course—to pen the book’s foreword. Tom and I were both regular speakers at several of the larger CRM conferences (though the rooms in which Tom spoke were considerably larger than mine). I thought I’d approach Tom at one of these events and ask him, in person, to write the book’s foreword.

Even though his entourage circled nervously as I approached, Tom was gracious and made sure I knew where to send my manuscript.

Six weeks later, I’d heard nothing.

[More after the break...]

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Jessica Tsai is in San Jose this week, for the 3rd International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. Her news story will post shortly over is now posted at destinationCRM.com, but we’ve collected a lightly edited selection of her live-twittering here, which we’ll be updating as the day goes on.

For tweets from other #AAAI / #ICWSM attendees, check the Summize results here.

Mon May 18 16:06    First speaker: Lillian Lee, associate prof @ Cornell U.

Mon May 18 17:36    Next: “Gesundheit! Modeling Contagion thru Facebook News Feed”
Eric Sun, Stanford; Itamar Rosenn, Cameron Marlow & Thomas Lento, Facebook

Mon May 18 18:15    Next: Xiao Wei, “Seeking and Offering Expertise across Categories: A Sustainable Mechanism Works for Baidu Knows.”

Mon May 18 18:51    Mary McGlohon “Community Structure and Information Flow in Usenet”

Mon May 18 20:37    Now: Dominique Cardon,”Does showing off help to make friends? Experimenting a Sociological Game on Self-Exhibition & Social Networks”

Mon May 18 21:11    Next: “What are they blogging about? Personality, Topic and Motivation in Blogs” Alastair J. Gill

Mon May 18 21:39    Next Talk:”A Social Identity Approach to Identify Familiar Strangers in a Social Network” Nitin Agarwal

Mon May 18 22:30 Up Now: “You Are Where You Edit: Locating Wikipedia Contributors Through Edit Histories” Michael Lieberman

Mon May 18 23:09 “CourseRank: A Closed-Community Social System through the Magnifying Glass” Georgia Koutrika

Tue May 19 00:13 “Using Transactional Information to Predict Link Strength in Online Social Networks,” Indika Kahanda

Tue May 19 00:16 Last session of the day: “RevRank: A Fully Unsupervised Algorithm for Selecting the Most Helpful Book Reviews,” Oren Tsur

[The complete tweetstream, after the jump...]

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When the market made a giant transition to digital photography, Kodak had some major rebranding to do. At the Aberdeen Group CMO Summit last year, Jeffrey Hayzlett, now chief marketing officer and vice president of Eastman Kodak, talked about how the company had to change its image. Consumers viewed Kodak as a traditional photo company and not, as the market demanded, a company up-to-date with the digital revolution. At the time, Kodak was second to competitor Sony in the digital-camera market. The company had to go where the market was going and on January 13, 2004, USA Today reported that “Eastman Kodak (EK)…will stop selling traditional film cameras in the USA, Canada and Western Europe.”

In an effort to amp up its digital initiative, Kodak aired what I thought was an awesome television commercial where a charismatic elderly gentleman is standing on a stage giving a very passionate speech about how Kodak is changing with the times. I’ve been searching – to no avail – for this clip ever since I saw the commercial at the Aberdeen conference last year. If anyone knows where to find it, please share!

[UPDATE, 5/19, 12.20aET: Guess what? We found the video. It's called "Winds of Change," and you can see it after the break.]

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About 40 years ago, a science fiction TV program with mediocre ratings but a vocal fan base got a temporary reprieve from cancellation through a massive letter-writing campaign. Recently, the eleventh motion picture spawned by that TV show topped the box-office returns and critics’ rankings. You may have heard of it: Star Trek.

While some argue about the actual effectiveness of the letter-writing campaign, and note that the show was canceled the next season after being moved to a disadvantageous time slot and having its budget cut, the fans who wrote those letters became the core of a community that began to meet on its own without studio sanction, and eventually helped motivate the launch of a film series and several subsequent TV shows. We may mock Trekkies (most prefer to be called “Trekkers,” though), but they showed the powerful potential of the voice of the customer.

It’s happening again. A science fiction TV show with mediocre ratings but a vocal fan base have saved the object of their affection from cancellation. The show is Dollhouse, creted by Joss Whedon. This time, the letter-writing campaign was conducted mostly paperlessly: fans Twittered about wanting the show saved, or posted pictures of themselves (holding/using products advertised by the show’s sponsors) to Flickr.

Of course these tactics don’t always work, at least not in terms of saving a show in danger of cancellation. Another Whedon show, Firefly, went down despite the best efforts of its fan community—but they’re still out there, those wacky Browncoats. For every program that gets saved by its fans, another 20 or more get chopped. (In fact, Dollhouse’s time slot neighbor Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was just canceled despite fan support.) That’s not entirely the point.

In almost every case, the supporters who rally behind something like a TV program retain a bond of affection and common cause long after their efforts have succeeded or failed. I’m not saying that degree of loyalty should be exploited, in the sense that “exploitation” has some negative connotations. But whether it’s Browncoats or Trekkers or what-have-you, these people are telling you what they want and begging you to exploit it.

Sometimes it’s not good business to give in to fan demands—TV is expensive. But not giving in isn’t the same thing as disregarding, and to disregard fans is to invite hatred. If you have to let ‘em down, let ‘em down easy.

* Disclosure: I admit to some bias on this topic. As you have already seen in some earlier posts, I am a huge science fiction geek. I’m too young to have been a real Trekker, but some of my earliest TV memories involve watching Trek reruns as a family, and I went to my first convention when I was six years old. I am a proud Browncoat, and am thrilled Dollhouse is getting a second chance, though I will miss Terminator.