The Death of a Salesman

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Frank Hayes offers some useful comments on the perils of CEM (Customer Elimination Management using CRM – Customer Relationship Management Software):

Siebel was built, inside and out, on CRM. Siebel was all about automating CRM as a business process.
Trouble is, customer relationship management isn’t primarily a business process that can be automated. Real management of customer relationships is a culture, a strategy, a way of doing business.
And too many organizations use CRM in a way that marketing guru Herschell Gordon Lewis has dubbed CEM — customer elimination management.
They don’t use CRM software to help good salesmen do a great job. Instead, they feed customers into the CRM sausage machine, a mechanical data-grinder that combines a phony familiarity — strangers in a call center who know everything about the customer — with a relentless, robotized drive to sell, sell, sell.

Pressthink: All Regimes are Founded on Opinion

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Jay Rosen has a very useful post over at PressThink:

He says, “As a pastor I have a very real sense of the importance of local dailies and even crappy ol’ free weeklies to build community, or foment division if that’s what clarity brings. Some regular platform for cueing the 20 percent of any town, village, or city that actually get things done as to what needs doing, or stopping, is incredibly important. I can’t figure out what that would look like in Midwestern communities without a newspaper, but I’m afraid that folks who are concerned about big-C Community had better start imagining, fast.”

Murdoch: The End of Newspapers as We Know Them

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The Economist:

?I BELIEVE too many of us editors and reporters are out of touch with our readers, ?Rupert Murdoch, the boss of News Corporation, one of the world’s largest media companies, told the American Society of Newspaper Editors last week. No wonder that people, and in particular the young, are ditching their newspapers. Today’s teens, twenty- and thirty-somethings ?don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important,? Mr Murdoch said, ?and they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel.? And yet, he went on, ?as an industry, many of us have been remarkably, unaccountably, complacent.?

Download Murdoch’s speech for free from audible.com

Skype & Telco Disintermediation

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Martin Geddes:

It would be a tragic mistake to underestimate the potential market power Skype is accumulating. According to Skype’s own figures from VON Canada, they’re sustaining a growth rate of 1000% a year. Just another 2 years of this growth and they would have over 200 million concurrent users online. This is not beyond plausibility given how Skype and broadband are symbiotically driving adoption of one-another; the addressable market is exploding too.

That means even if you’re a mega-telco — a Verizon or a Vodafone — you’re screwed. You can create your own Private Voice Application, and start marketing it to your early-adopter users, but who ya gonna call? Ain’t nobody but Skypers out there. Want some Skype presence in your Vodafone-branded VoIP app? Gonna cost ya!

Minneapolis named top “Technopolis”

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Some interesting tidbits on Minneapolis in the latest eprairie newsletter, including Popular Science’s proclamation as the top “Technopolis”.

UW-Whitewater’s Literate Cities Study ranked Minneapolis #1… (Madison was #4). Take a look at their data sources, here. (I wonder what the yellow pages tells them, exactly. I never use it, frankly. The web is much faster).

I also have my doubts on the value of newspaper circulation data, now.