Marketing with Technology and More

The Invisible Hand Can Be Seen

Back in my University days I took quite a number of economics courses.  One of the first books most  economics students read in those days (and maybe still do) was Scottish economist Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations originally published in 1776.  I enjoyed that book immensely and thought it gave a great explanation of how an economic system was driven by individuals.  One key premise that Smith built his economic treatise on he dubbed  “The Invisible Hand.”

“The Invisible Hand,” was a great metaphor for how markets used to work.  The basic premise was that in free-markets, individuals, driven by their own-self interest, will act in a way that ultimately maximizes the wealth of a community.  “The invisible hand” will guide each in a way that ensures that by maximizing their own self-interest society as a whole gains the most.  Individuals neither intend to promote the public interest, nor do they even know that they are doing so, yet they do, by trying to maximize their own lot in life.

We know much more about economics today than we did in Smith’s time (yet we still manage to screw it up), however this is not my point here.  I believe that “The Invisible Hand” can now be seen in a way that it has never been visible before.  I was first excited by the Internet and what it initially did to reduce friction on economic activity.  Now, along come social networking tools, and I think they are in the process of severing the invisible hand.  For if you are listen to the social media/net world, it is easy to hear discussions that lay out market direction, before the market actually move.

Honest dialog is occurring about products, companies, politics, ideas, movements, organizations, events and tribes (to use Seth Godin’s metaphor).  People may still operate in their own self-interest, but communicate about it in a rare and extended way that distributes that which is of value to society at lightning speed.  So, self-interest that is self-serving is self-destructive in an unprecedented way.  We are at the dawn of the social network era (think Internet 1995) the basic social networking tools of today, blogs, wiki's, photo sharing, etc along with popular commercial resources (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Plurk, etc) are empowering people to help each other in ways that are extremely transparent and would have been impossible in the past. 

If you are in the conversation, you know what I mean.  If not, be prepared to wake up some day by being slapped in the face by a very visible hand that you just haven’t been looking at.

Blog about my email newsletter

Our company SubscriberMail, sends out a variety of email newsletters, I was excited to see that an industry blogger I follow named Tamara Gielen recently picked up one of our newsletters and used it in its entirety on their blog.  It made me realize that the blogging community can extend the reach of your email publications if you can actively cultivate a relationship with bloggers in your industry.  This is particularly true in the business-to-business space.  As blogging becomes more of a mainstream communication vehicle, even trade media writers are using it as an additional outlet creating an increasing need for content.

So, my recommendation is actively reach out to the blogger community.  Inform them about your newsletter (don’t subscribe them without their permission however) and invite them to become a subscriber.  Of course, make sure that the content is relevant and grant them permission to reprint anything they might find interesting with proper attribution and a link back to your website.

If you want to check out if someone is already blogging about your newsletter, visit Technorati, or Google Blog Search one of the other  blogging search engines and type in your company name, or a couple of lines from one of your recent newsletters and see what pops up. 

Salesforce.com Forgets Email's Power

I have been one of the most ardent supporters of Salesforce.com.  I think their product is great, and it has been extremely useful in our business.  I have probably sent them at least 10 corporate customers because I have liked what they do.  Until now.

Last week, Salesforce went down for about two hours in the middle of the day.  The week before that the API did not work for an entire day.  Our sales force has found the tool extremely slow for the past three weeks.  To date, not a word from the company.  It seems they have forgotten about the power email has in communicating with their customers. 

On their system status page it states, "In the highly unlikely event of extended service unavailability, all customers will receive timely email updates on system status".  I guess I am missing what they would call "extended service unavailability."  When you log on to their site, nothing.  It is like they are pretending nothing happened, it was business as usual.  In this day and age, when word of mouth can have such an impact.  How can the company be so uncommunicative to their customers.  Especially when it is so easy to do.Unless you pay for their premium support, you do not have access to the system status page (although according to  the Salesforcewatch blog, they may make this page available to all customers next week). 

I'm sure Salesforce CEO Mark Beinoff is concerned the way Wall Street beat up the stock on Friday.  This is nothing compared to the damage being done to the goodwill and fantastic word of mouth evangelism that is rapidly evaporating.  Ironically, earlier this month Beinoff sent a memo to employees  about SAP's entrance to the on-demand CRM world.  It was titled  SAP on the Defense (a copy of the full memo was included in Steve Hamm's Tech Beat).  Perhaps Beinoff might be wise to try some defense and use email to stay in touch with his customers.