Social for Business > Social for Consumer

Everyone keeps asking me how I ended up at Hearsay Social, so I thought I would just write one blog post to explain it.

After 8 years at Google Enterprise where I battled Balmer and crew everyday I was pretty exhausted. I knew that I needed to do something different at Google or maybe just take a break.

One day, I had lunch with my friend Scott Petry. Scott is a friend from Google, founder of Positini, Liberterian and general all around good guy.  Scott left Google to found another startup. Check them out at Authentic8. I asked Scott one key question,  “Should I slow down, take a longer break or jump into one of the several things that people were pulling me into?” His answer was simple. Take a break, until you find something that you are passionate about. When you find it get jump back into overdrive.

And I found it quicker than I thought…its Social for Business!

Let me explain my thinking.

I am an enterprise guy, not a consumer guy. I became convinced Social for Business would have a greater impact than Social for Consumer. Don’t Laugh! Just keep reading.

It doesn’t take a genius to know Social is a big thing. Social is battling mobile for the fastest growing technology in the history of mankind. It’s faster than business computing, faster than personal computing, faster than the Internet itself. Facebook has a 1B users and a market cap of $64B. Linkedin has 200M users and a market cap of $17B. Twitter has 200M users and a valuation of around $10B. Newcomer Google + even has 135M users.

The social revolution like the mobile revolution has been overwhelmingly driven by consumer and individual use.  It has revolutionized how individuals build and maintain relationships. Its power lies not is helping us build relationships with those closest to us. Its power lies in helping us create and maintain the so-called “weak tie” relationships. It keeps me stay in touch with my high school and university friends. It helps me maintain relationships with the guys that I coached with in Little League and it allows me to share pictures and experiences with my extended family who live 3000 miles away. I have about 100 personal friends and about 20 business friends on Facebook.

But here is the revelation for me; I have over 1000 LinkedIn connections where the weak tie relationships are much broader. I  use LinkedIn exclusively for business and Facebook for personal and a little bit of business. On LinkedIn, I am connected to my past bosses, my past coworkers, my past customers, my past partners, not to mention my current connections. I realized that the 1000 connections are still a subset of the business people that I should be connected to from my 28 years in business. I realized that if I was really being the professional networker that I should be, that my network should easily be double my current size and growing.

Not only is my professional social network bigger than my personal social network, I realized the value of my professional network was much larger. As a person who builds businesses by hiring great people and by getting customers, the value of all my weak- tie relationships was not a “nice to have”; it was a “must have”. My professional weak ties were essential to my professional passion and the very things that put the dollars in the bank that feed my family.

So for me, it’s not close. Social network for Business is > Social for Personal. I know that there are a lot of people out there that are similar to me.

And yet, we have only scratched the surface on leveraging social networks for business. Business is advertising on social networks to find new customers and LinkedIn has built a pretty good recruiting solution on their platform. Jive, Yammer and Salesforce’s chatter have built tools so employees at large companies can be social together. But we have done precious little to build technologies that leverage Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google + to do what social networks were designed to do. We need to use those networks to build and maintain Business Relationships! In business weak tie relationship are 95% of all your relationships. We need to leverage those weak ties relationships to build our businesses. If you’re an executive building a business or anyone in a customer-facing role, then building relationships with social isn’t an option, it’s a necessity.

And that’s why I am not taking a break. I am convinced that Social for Business > Social for Consumer. I know it hard to believe, but its true.

Then I met Clara Shih and Steve Garrity through Kristin Shevis. Their company, Hearsay Social was founded with the realization that Social for Business would be huge.  Clara even wrote a best seller about it, The FaceBook Era. They realized that Social for Business would not be a new network, but would have to piggyback on the existing networks. They built some great technology to leverage Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ and landed about 50 customers who shared their vision. They are not just little customers, but big Fortune 500 customers.

We are just getting started. It’s going to be big! It’s going to be fun! It’s going to help businesses a lot!

You will hear more about how I plan to help us bring Social to Business and especially to customer facing people. Stay Tuned to this blog.

I guess I will rest and kick back later. I promise.

Let's Sell the U.S. Postal Service.

Beware. Rant starting.

The US Postal Service has been in my twitter stream too often in the past weeks. First, they announced that they were not going to deliver mail on Saturdays. They are suing Lance Armstrong and then recently they announced the launch of a new line of United States Postal Service clothing. At first I thought it was an Onion article, but apparently its true. What!!!!!!!! The United States government, which is currently running a trillion dollar deficit is getting in the clothing business!!!!!!! I think we all know where this is headed! Eliminating one day of service and launching a fringe revenue stream is simply shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic!

Is this really the long term plan the US Government has for an agency that lost $16 Billion dollars last year and is projecting a loss of over $20 Billion this year!

So the time has for the US government to get out of the mail and package delivery business. As a new US citizen, I took the time to read the Constitution and saw that I have certain unalienable rights. Among those are the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I did not see anything about the right to have mail delivered to my home and below market rates. Did I miss something?

Lets face it. There is no need to have the government in the mail and package delivery business. Fabulous companies like UPS and Fedex have been built that really know how to do this. Amazon and Google are cooking up ways to streamline same day and next day delivery. Do we really think the US Postal Service is going to beat Amazon. Google, UPS and Fedex????? This is only going to get worse. Those guys will keep getting better and siphon off the most profitable parts of the business until the USPS is left with delivering mail to rural areas and under market priced bulk mail from direct marketers.

Not only does the USPS face impossible competition. It’s core business is shrinking ( first class mail is down 25% from its peak) and will eventually go away. Email, text, skype, social networking are how we communicate today, not letters. If you want to send me a birthday card, send me an electronic one. All my creditors want to bill me online and I want to pay online. I read my magazines on my iPad so my Sports Illustrated is no longer on the  US Postal service critical list.

Now, I know that seniors are not going to be happy. They want to get mail every day and doing business online is less natural for them. But if the US Postal service is counting on them as their core market, I have further bad news for them. There core market is dying!!!!! Literally.

I am not advocating that we shut the US Postal service down. I am advocating that we sell it! A private company can deliver mail at market rates. If you want delivery on Saturday, you can pay for it! If direct marketers want reliable 6 day delivery, they can pay for it. Can someone forward this blog on to some enterprising investment bankers! Let them run the numbers and I will help put the pitch deck together. Can one of my Democratic friends get us an appointment with Obama and Harry Reid? I know I can make this sale!

I have to say that I am a little uncertain on how US Postal Service accounting works. It does not take traditional taxpayers dollars, but they borrow money from the US Treasury. So, I can’t see how we are not on the hook for this. Worse than this, I have a feeling the US Postal annual deficit is not included in the total US Deficit numbers we see regularly. I feel we are $16B worse off than the $1089B that was officially recorded.

Some of this is written, tongue in cheek, but the concept is serious. I know that we can’t address the trillion-dollar deficit by saving a few billion per year on the Postal Service. But if we can’t come to grips with terminating government departments that are no longer needed, then what hope to we ever have of balancing the budget.

We have 100 Employes and Zero IT Staff!

My company, Hearsay Social has about 100 employees and growing. We have Zero people in IT. We do have a contractor that comes in every Wednesday. He provisions our Google Apps users and handles any client device problems that we have. We also have someone in accounting, who is pretty tech savvy and he might spent 5% of his time on IT things, but really we have Zero IT staff!

I know we are small, but 100 employees and no IT staff is pretty good.  Better than that, we have very good internal systems. Google Apps for Email/Cal; Salesforce.com for SFA; ZenDesk for support; Marketo for marketing, Box for file sharing and few other cloud based systems. Our Engineers are tricked out with the top of line devices, almost everyone else has a MacBook Air. We bought some iPads for our sales people, but all other mobile devices are BYOD. We even have our own internal social network, but we don't use Jive or Sharepoint/Yammer, we use Facebook Private groups to keep connected to one another on a personal level.

So, I started to wonder, why do companies like GE, GM, Exxon need so many staff and are they worried that startups need no IT staff? Probably not, but I thought I would list the reasons that we need no IT staff:

• All our employees are either engineers or young tech savy people. They come with no expectations that IT might help them.
• All our internal systems (and our application) are cloud based. We have no servers. We have no disk drives. We have no people running around to do capacity planning or availability studies. If SF.com and Google Apps are up, then we are up! If they are down, we are down. But they are not down very often, are they?
• The end user departments can administer and configure their own cloud based systems. Marketing does Marketo. Customer Success does ZenDesk, Sales does SF.com, Accounting does their cloud based system.  So we don't have legions of people administering systems and if the system is not to the department's liking, they fix it themselves.
• We have no custom internal systems. No one maintaining old code for internal use. No one developing new code for internal use. 

Now, I am not suggesting Fortune 500 companies can have no IT staff. Large companies have none of the inherent advantages that a small company like ours has. what is that old saying, "God created the world in seven days, but he did not have a legacy install base." But that dosen't mean their are no lessons to learn. Big company IT should embrace cloud based applications packages and end user departments should "own" them. Mobile BYOD and minimal custom systems are also no brainers.  Finally, big company IT should put in place systems that encourage end user self sufficiency and big company employees should not require that IT wipes thier nose at every turn.

I wonder when we will hire our first IT staff? I am betting we can scale to 250 employees without one. I will keep you posted.

Cool or Creepy? Two Different Views of the Same Thing

Tonight at a late dinner, we had a family experience that crystalized the debate for me on technology, privacy and the internet.

My wife and 9 year old were planning a trip to Gamestop to get a new Xbox Game for my son. My son was excited and talking constantly about it over dinner. I glanced down at my Samsung Galaxy Note II and in the notification drop down from Google Now is this:

Somehow, my Android phone had figured out that my wife and son were going to Game Stop and in normal traffic it would take only eleven minutes. Wow...how did it know this? I asked if they had sent me an email or put it in my calendar. They had not. We were amazed , but confused.

We eventually figured out that my wife had Googled the Gamestop location on Chrome and since I allow Chome to share data with all my devices...Google Now was providing me driving directions and time estimates to Gamestop.

Here's where it got interesting. My reaction was "Cool, what amazing technology";  My wife's reaction, was "Ewwww, turn that feature off".

All Internet and technology companies now face decisions about technology and its use that will have to walk the line between these two user types, those that say "Cool" and those that say "Ewwww".

Well, it won't be boring! :-)

P.S. -Note to self, use Incognito feature on Chrome and sign out of Google Accounts when using other's computers.

Innovate or Fear Monger?

Almost 6 years ago, I helped start the cloud business email wars and while I have moved on, I still watch the space with more than passing interest. Two things caught my eye this week.

First, there was a launch of new mobile app for Gmail from Mailbox. I really like what they have done here. There are tons of new ways to manage your mobile inbox. Check out the video here. Mailbox understands that we are living in a mobile first world. They didn't start with a web app, they started with mobile. I love this value prop: 

“Inbox Zero. Daily. When your inbox holds just the stuff you need to address now, email feels lighter and faster. Mailbox makes getting to zero — and staying there — a breeze. After you experience a clean inbox, you'll wonder how you ever lived without it.”

The second thing that caught my eye was Microsoft's Scroogled campaign against Gmail. 

I really think these Anti-Google Scroogled campaigns are a bad idea. The most recent campaign accusing Google of reading all users email because it places ads in its consumer Gmail service. The videos use a set of eyes to imply a person is reading email. It fails to point out that the email is only read by computers, not humans. More importantly it fails to point out that Microsoft and all email providers do the same thing. All email providers must read email in order to filter spam. Every email sent in every consumer and corporate system is read by a computer. Advertising falsehoods is never a good idea.

Worse than that for Microsoft, they will almost certainly not work. I think they are getting some advice from ex-political ad man, Mark Penn. If Microsoft’s advisors are telling you that you can “swiftboat” Google or “define Google” the way the Obama campaign defined Romney in summer of 2012, I can tell them that it won’t work. Those campaigns worked because Kerry and Romney did not have established brands. Google has a very positive established brand that it has rightfully earned.

So, two big things in email this week. A small startup trying to out innovate Google, Apple and Microsoft on mobile. And Microsoft trying to scare people into using their web based application. Not sure if Mailbox can win against the big guys, but I give them a better chance than Microsoft does of scaring people away from Gmail.

 

Go Niners!

My son Steven is huge 49ers fan.  I was thinking about taking him to New Orleans, but I thought 9 years old might be a little young for Bourbon Street. In order to prepare for today's game, we decided to get up early and throw the football at 10 San Francisco Landmarks. My arm is killing me, but I think we have channelled some good energy to Harbaugh and crew!

PS - Steve is rocking the Joe Montana throwback jersey, but will be switching to his Kaepernick at kickoff. The Vernon Davis and Frank Gore will be worn in post game.

Go Niners!

Under The Bay Bridge

Pier 39

Coit Tower

Golden Gate Bridge

Fort Point with the Surfers

Crissy Field

Palace of Fine Arts

The Painted Ladies at Alamo Square

AT&T Park

Candlestick Park