Today is the second day of JiveWorld, Jive’s first customer conference here in San Francisco, and so far it has been an exciting mixture of my current role at Jive and my past role at Forrester. Yesterday I had the pleasure of joining Jive’s Executive Advisory Board meetings and ran into several customers who had followed my work at Forrester. That evening I bumped in to a pair of attendees from a Forrester client I had consulted for this past summer, and I also got the chance to catch up with the always insightful Susan Scrupski.

The best though was attending a presentation from Forrester’s Corey Matthews, the firm’s top Web Marketing Manager, who was presenting some of the results from Forrester’s own use of Jive SBS for its Forrester Leadership Board offerings. Shortly before his session Corey and I chatted a bit about Forrester and Jive, at which point Corey said something that really struck me: “You are now like the 10th person at Jive I know on a first name basis.”

I stopped for a second, replayed the previous 24 hours, and suddenly realized that nearly every interaction between a Jiver and a customer started with the Jiver greeting the customer by name. Yesterday: “Hey Jim, we’re getting that code ready for you later this week, I think you’ll be really happy.” Lunch today: “Jennifer, how is your rollout strategy progressing?” Hallway: “Mike! Its great to see you, how are you enjoying the conference?” You’ll have to trust me when I say this interaction is completely genuine too. Frankly the conference badges are microscopic — you couldn’t fake it if you tried!

I’ve been at Jive for about a month now and of all the wonderful things I’ve seen this is the most amazing to me. I promised myself I wouldn’t breathlessly blog about how great Jive is, but this post will have to be the exception; it’s too hard not to share the excitement of working for a company that truly cares about its customers. Though on the flip side, I’m horrible with names . . .

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With great excitement and a bit of sadness I wanted to quickly announce that I will be leaving Forrester Research and joining Jive Software. My last day at Forrester is tomorrow.

All told its been a great (nearly) five years at Forrester and I am tremendously grateful to all the past and present Forrester employees who made the job so exciting for me. I’m confident that the Forrester team I leave behind will be in great shape to pick up my research themes and carry them as far as I would have, if not further. Specifically Laura Ramos, Rob Koplowitz, and TJ Keitt will be taking over where I left off.

As for me, I will be joining Jive Software as a Sr. Product Manager. I’m very excited for the new challenge.

Finally, for the loyal readers of this blog, I don’t expect much to change at StrategicHeading.com — the blog should be just as focused as before and cover largely the same content. As for the recent posting hiatus, please forgive me — I was a bit tied up working out all the above details!

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Well this has nothing to do with social media whatsoever, but I got a good laugh this morning when I checked in on the Detroit Tigers. I know newspapers aren’t doing well these days, but this is getting a bit personal (see below).

Here is the article in case you want to check in on the original.

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Now that hockey and basketball have officially closed up shop I’m starting to tune back into baseball and have been pleased to find my Tigers in first place — in the worst division in baseball, but hey, I’ll take it. Its been quite a few years since I have lived in Detroit, so when the Tigers are in town I try to get to as many games as I can. When they aren’t I spend my time going to Giants and A’s games mostly when the weather is nice, a couple of top shelf pitchers are going, or I just need a baseball fix.

Tonight I’m going to see Randy Johnson. I’ve never had the opportunity to see The Big Unit in person and I am looking forward to catching one of the games best pitchers before he retires — even if he’s not quite as intimidating as he used to be. So, as per usual I went over to StubHub to find tickets. Now, in my view, StubHub is the best place to find tickets for the simple fact that it has an interactive map of what tickets are available (why Ticketmaster can’t seem to figure out this technology is beyond me). So, in just a few minutes I found tickets and was ready to roll.

So I clicked “purchase” and logged in. What did I find next in my purchase process, why the screen shot below (you may need to click in to see exactly what has gone wrong).

Now, I am a big fan of site analytics. Anything you can do to get a better understanding of how your website is working or how satisfied your users are is worth the effort. But I have to question placing the popup one-third of the way through my purchase! Now I know, the ForeSee popup is random, but come on guys, how hard is it to hold the survey until after I’ve completed what I actually came to the site to do. My guess is if you can hold on just a few more clicks you’ll get a considerably more response.

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When I moved to San Francisco from Boston about a year ago the biggest change was not the weather, the food, or the hills, but the commute to the office. In Boston it took me about a half hour to walk to work across the Charles River via the Mass Ave. Bridge and through MIT’s main campus. In San Francisco it takes me about a half hour to drive down Van Ness to the 101, and down the 101 to Foster City, where Forrester’s main Bay Area office is inconveniently located (public transportation is unfortunately about a 1.5 to 2 hour ordeal, since the office is no where near CalTrain or BART).

Needless to say, this new set-up required a car, and I had not owned a car since high school — a red 1976 Impala station wagon, in case you were wondering. Like many Americans I embraced the freedom of a car and decided to go full bore and get myself a GPS for easy navigation to client sites, weekend get-aways, (eventual) cross-country drives, and alley trapping. The Garmin Nuvi 660 was the big winner and I have been pleased with the purchase. One of my favorite features has been the built-in traffic; the device has saved me from getting stuck in several major jams. However a couple of months ago the traffic subscription expired. Since I had been impressed with the results so far I decided to plunk down the $60.00 to get traffic for life.

This is where the trouble began . . .

Like many companies Garmin has a handy online purchasing process for many of its services, so one afternoon I grabbed my GPS, headed to my computer and set out to update the subscription. I was moving along quite nicely — I had found my device in their list and had found the traffic service — when I was surprised to see step 4 (below).

GPS? Check. Power source? We’re plugged into the computer so, check. Turn the key in the ignition . . . umm, my computer doesn’t come with an ignition.

After a few moments too long of dumbfounded staring I realized that Garmin either expected me to have an internet connection in my car, or I was to go to my car, find the receiver unit ID, and come back to input it. Now, I’m not a lazy man, but I was very close to packing it in right here. Since I live in San Francisco and park the car on the street, the trek to the car is not as simple as stepping into the garage and turning on the car. For me this meant first remembering where I parked, and second walking up and over Russian Hill — a brief aside, never try to park in Russian Hill unless its 10AM to 4PM Monday through Friday.

After completing this task I returned to my computer, continued my way through the process, handed over my credit card, and was presented with my next obstacle: a 16-digit HEX code that needed to be input back into the GPS once I returned yet again to the car.

Well, dear reader, you should be happy to know that I survived, and once again receive traffic updates on my GPS. Despite my triumph I couldn’t help but wonder how many others were less fortunate, and fell out of the process along the way and, further still, how much that cost Garmin in lost revenue. So, I decided to do a very rough back of the envelope calculation (most numbers are conservative guesses):

Estimated 2008 Device Sales: 18 million
Percent that are traffic enabled: 20%
Traffic enabled devices in 2008: 3.6 million

Percent of people with traffic devices that would pay for traffic: 10%
Potential traffic sales: 360,000

Percent of people who drop out of the online form: 10%
Lost purchases: 36,000
Lost revenue at $60 per purchase: $2.16 million

What would be the cost of at least informing me I would need to make the trip back and form to my car, or telling me what I would need before getting started? My guess is nothing at all.

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I just finished reading a great Q&A in CW Bulletin, the online companion to CW Magazine. The interview is with a veteran creative director and entrepreneur at Grayton Integrated Publishing on how to cut costs with creative projects like marketing, advertising, and publications.

The interview contains some very sound advice, and I was struck at how much of it sounds familiar (pun intended):

What’s the first step to defining your objectives?
Whether you’re creating a magazine or a brochure or launching a full-blown campaign, don’t discuss what it will look like until you’ve agreed on its purpose. Who is your audience? What are you telling them? What are you hoping to achieve? Don’t try to figure out if your vehicle should be a bus or a Ferrari until you’ve determined where it’s coming from and where it’s headed.

Turns out the interviewee is my mother. Long-time readers of this blog may also remember that my Grandmother was recently in Sailing Magazine.

Alright dad, time to step it up!

Update: A few gramatical errors and some horrible spelling errors. Turns out my mother was also a copy editor.

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We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to bring you some breaking news: the Detroit Lions suck.

All joking aside I would like to take a brief moment to reflect on my sorry excuse for a football team, the Detroit Lions, who stand on the brink of the first winless season in the NFL since the league expanded to a 16 game schedule in 1978. Yes, I am a Lions fan. No, I am not willing to switch allegiances to the Raiders or the Niners. Yes, I am rooting for an 0-16 season.

It took me a long time to fully embrace 0-16. All the way up to 0-14 I was rooting for a win each week. But the last two weeks something clicked. We are guaranteed to be one of the top 5 worst teams in NFL history regardless of what happens today so we might as well go all in and grab an undisputed #1. I don’t expect to ever get into arguments with Steelers fans, Patriots fans, or Giants fans over the best teams and franchises in NFL history, but I do expect to get into plenty of arguments with Raiders fans, Cardinals fans, and Seahawks fans over the worst.

So here is to the trump card. Here is to embracing the misery. And here is to the Red Wings and the Pistons; thank god for small miracles — I could have grown up in Cleveland.

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One of the major knocks on SaaS (and Web based apps in general) is what happens when you have no connectivity. As an analyst I travel a fair deal and many of my most productive hours are spent sitting on a plane responding to email, writing reports, and catching up on all the research I should be reading but often don’t have time for. What I can’t do: file my expense reports, close my CRM records, or complete my end-of-quarter evaluations. All of these apps are delivered to me online.

All things considered this has never been that big of a deal for me. But it hasn’t stopped SaaS critics from knocking these apps as insufficient. Not surprisingly there have been two ways to handle such concerns. First — the route taken by Etelos, Zoho (via GoogleGears), and others — is building apps that have the ability to go offline and then sync back up on re-connectivity. This works quite well with Outlook and my mail file, but frankly gets pretty complicated when we start talking about collaborative applications like spreadsheets, powerpoint decks, or Word documents, all of which are leading candidates for SaaS delivery. The second tactic — the route that Google seems to be taking, despite GoogleGears — is to wait it out; connectivity will eventually catch up to the apps.

Right now I have to give a big vote for the latter tactic. As I write I’m somewhere over Pennsylvania on an American Airlines flight from JFK to SFO. I’m on my way home from Thanksgiving and using Gogo, the Aircell offering available now on select AA routes. Though I couldn’t use iPass — the single best application Forrester provides us — sign up for Gogo was fast and efficient. I even had a brief chat conversation with a customer service rep to get things squared away. The connectivity is fantastic and, if I were to be honest, better than I’ve had the last week in Connecticut (thank you Stamford Sheraton). With one easy transaction one of the last places I get stuck without connectivity is gone — at least when I fly from JFO to SFO. Best of all Hulu is working like a champ. Now I just have to get those damned expense reports filed . . . as soon as I’m done with this episode of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia.

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I just got back from a week in Tokyo — sorry about the light posting — where I was consulting and running a workshop. I have to say: Tokyo is a BIG city! I spent a year in London back in 2002-2003, and while London seems to spread out over most of the island nothing quite prepared me for Tokyo. Every direction you look, all the way to the horizon its just skyscraper after skyscraper; clusters of them going on forever.

As for the picture above, that’s what much of the city felt like, a complete blur. Its nice to be home — until tomorrow anyway. If you are heading to the IBM Software Analyst conference let me know.

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MindTouch has reportedly grown its revenue very aggressively in its past fiscal year. According to VentureBeat, “in the year ended October, the company says its revenue grew 612 percent while the number of customers grew 368 percent.” The company blogged about the news earlier this week.

This is a big number but not unexpected. MindTouch was growing from a small base — MindTouch is an open source company — and the wind was most certainly at the company’s back in 2007-2008. As someone who predicted a 47% CAGR for the enterprise Web 2.0 market its nice to see these kinds of numbers, though clearly they are not going to be typical for the industry as a whole.

No word yet if the company is profitable — my gut says no — but in either case congratulations to Aaron and the team.

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