Passion drives me: People, Tech Innovation, Change. Building Amazing Product Experiences to drive business Growth. Vegetarian Foodie. Aspiration: a limitless world. Empowering people is my thing. Author of IoT Disruptions. Mobile & IoT Instructor at Stanford
I have organized this book into five parts. See below to get a feel for what is included in this book to make it the definitive source about how to build an IoT business either a new one or to extend an existing business.
This book is organized into five parts.
Part I covers the strategic approach to building an IoT Business from a technology idea. This section
is particularly important for Product Strategists and Product Managers. It
covers how toextend an existing business using IoT or create a new business. You
will also learn to optimize the Customer
Experience across multi-device customer touch points.
Part II offers an in-depth look at Internet of Thingsapplications
ranging from consumer applications such as wearables, smart cities and connected cars to industrial and
manufacturing applications. This is a methodical discussion of challenges
and best practices in building and launching IoT applications with case studies
of current IoT Businesses. In this section, you will also learn what is ‘Machine to Machine’ (M2M).
Part III covers disruptive
innovations from Internet of Things across industries and the evolving best
practices of value creation. In this section you will get an in-depth
analysis about top three industries healthcare,
retail and education. We will look at proximity sensors (Beacons) and the difference between
Beacon deployment standards for iOS and Android and a case study on the
application of beacons by several global retailers
in stores, malls and airports. Finally you will be introduced to innovative
disruptions impacting product brochures and education industries making the transition from paper to
electronics using IoT to bridge the gap.
Part IVwill cover
technologies that make up the IoT ecosystem that have a strategic impact on
the business you build. I cover Big
Data, Predictive Analytics, Data Science and how value is created from IoT
data. This is a fast growing area of IoT adoption and you will learn methods as
well as data applications that you could apply to your business.
Part V is about the future of IoT. First we start with a section on
IoT jobs. Then, I will share
mind-blowing examples that are pushing the human machine boundary with the
merger of IoT and Artificial
Intelligence and affective computing. I will cover Bio Payments and Augmented reality. I hope you derive inspiration
as much as knowledge from this section.
If this book is for you, I'll appreciate if you can share a review on Amazon. If not please share it on Twitter or LinkedIn or Good Reads to others who will benefit from this.
I am excited as I am building out the curriculum for my new in-campus course I am getting ready to teach at Stanford Continuing Studies Program for adults.
This course is for Entrepreneurs and Product Managers to learn -
With a Case study approach:
How to take a Technology innovation and make it into a business
Breaking down IoT Products as Business Applications.
Opportunity to build an IoT Product understanding Customer Experience for an IoT
Strategic thinking to tie product roadmap to business strategy
Develop a strategic approach to extend a business using Mobile and/or IoT
Look for updates on the guest speakers and the mini-case studies I'll be sharing shortly. If you would like to get my IoT case studies as I prepare for the course and book you are welcome to signup here
I'd love to hear your questions/thoughts if you are a prospective student considering this course or if you have passion in this topic and have ideas of case studies I should include in this program or my upcoming print book "The Internet of Things Business Primer".
I love the junction of Product and Data. Internet of Things creates value at that perfect junction making it exciting for me.
IoT
is about making ordinary things all around us smart by adding sensors
and giving it Internet access. These sensors keep collecting data. It
could be the temperature inside your home, oven, our bodies, or in a
steel plant or many other sensor data for motion, luminescence, touch,
acceleration, humidity etc. The sensors collect this data at a repeat
frequency creating a vast pool of data.
In simple cases the sensor
can check against a preset level and take some action. Turn on the
sprinkler if the temperature is above a certain threshold. Notify the
granary owner if the humidity of stored wheat is above a certain safety
level. Send me an alert if my garage is left open for longer than five
minutes.
As I play with more IoT products and engage with
entrepreneurs solving customer problems I am increasingly fascinated by
the power from processing IoT Data and the many ways value is created
from this data.
Data Science and IoT from Ajit Jaokar
Ajit
Jaokar was the first person who introduced me to the power of Data
Science and IoT. He has taught at Oxford, is based in London and offers online classes customized to anyone who wants to learn this topic either to solve a complex data problem for their business or to enhance their careers in IoT Analytics.
In
simple cases, one can look at IoT data and analyze for patterns to
build predictive models. This is used by Boeing and many manufacturing
plants to monitor health of equipment to predict failures to do
preventive maintenance.
Machine Learning
Instead of rule setting you could apply Machine learning and now the horizons open up.
Machine Learning involves training a model by feeding it data to make predictions against a performance measure.
Nailbot is a robot that offers manicures for teen girls and uses machine learning to adapt to nail sizes of the girls. ProGlove, an industrial wearable uses machine learning to predict any quality glitches in a manufacturing process.
Take it another notch with Deep Learning
Deep
learning is about feeding large volume of data to the computer to learn
about a system or game or character identification without a human
telling them the rules. It is best suited for problems that have many
dimensions and no rules. e.g Facial recognition
Ajit is passionate
about the idea of applying deep learning to smart city scenarios.
Imagine being in a crowded stadium or 4th of July parade and if a parent
gets separated from a child, its a nightmare to locate the child. Deep
learning of the video footage can apply the algorithm similar to the one
Apple or Google or Facebook use to identify faces in photos to predict
where the parent and child are in the crowd in real time to help bring
them together.
Ajit is offering the 3rd cohort of his Deep learning and IoT class onsite for Londoners or Online for everyone else (across time zones) and the next batch starts on Nov 10th - Details here.
I
would love to hear your comments below if you have taken Ajit's Data
Science and IoT course or if you have questions/comments/skepticism
about how real is IoT and Data Science or if you are using Data Science
for your IoT product to do something fascinating.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ABOUT SUDHA JAMTHE Sudha Jamthe is the author of the Amazon Kindle book "IOT Disruptions" anda
Mobile & IoT Product and Business Leader who loves playing with IoT
and data to figure out whether we can build products to change the
boundary of human and machines. She is an innovation advisor for Blockchain University and Barcelona Technology School. Join her weekly video show The IoT Show for analysis with global guests about innovations in Internet of Things.
Opinions are mine unless you want to own them
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thank You for joining me in this mode to research, learn and educate about the evolving innovations in Internet of Things with my weekly "The IoT Show".
I host the show weekly to cover an indepth analysis of a topic in Internet of Things space. I livestream on YouTube, Periscope on Twitter and on Google Hangout.
Topics covered include:
Data Science & IoT with Ajit Jaokar of Oxford/UK
iBeacon Living Lab, Amsterdam
Power of Sensors with Sense360, LA
Audi TT Brochure Hack with Rajorfish Germany
IoT Accelerators with Damir Čaušević of Starcube, CZ
IoT Innovations & Hackathon with Neal Shyam NY
Home Automation and Connected Homes
Productizing IoT Challenges with Kolibree, London
IoT Are People and IoT and AI with Jim Hunter and Ahmed Banafa
Ping me on Twitter if you are/know someone who can join as a guest on The IoT Show.
Amazon owns 1-click shopping on the web. So its not a surprise for
Amazon to make our long-due dream of making our household appliances
smart - with 1-click push of a button. The Amazon Dash Button launched
today!
How we hate to go shopping for Diapers and Garbage Bags
The
product person is me is impressed by the design of the slick button,
the tap of the button synonymous to the 1-click action we associate with
Amazon brand and how it reduces friction in purchasing non-fun
essential items like soap, coffee, garbage bags, printer paper, shaving
cream and diapers. And it seamlessly extends Amazon's commerce business right into our home.
Have you seen Flic the Wireless Smart Button on IndieGoGo?
This is a generic 1 click IOT button a startup is planning to build.
Watch the video, it is hilarious!
Amazon
offers the IOT device, the App, the platform and owns the inventory of
the brand consumables. So they are able to offer a seamless frictionless
experience for the consumer setting it up for success.
My Take on Whats Behind the Dash Button
It
looks like the button is a Bluetooth device that communicates with
Amazon App on your smartphone and uses the Phone's connection to order
online. Amazon is giving a custom button for each brand so it
simplifies it for consumers to order particular consumables. So you get a
button for Tide and stick it to your washing machine and another button
for your coffee maker. Each Bluetooth device has a unique Mac address.
When you set it up first time, it will tie to your Amazon identity and
let you configure (I am guessing here) some sizes/quantity/type of the
item to get to a particular SKU in Amazon's catalog. Subsequently when
you press the button it tells the App to order that item and sends an
alert giving the user the freedom to cancel the order.
Once
you order the item, subsequently the order tracking comes via mobile
alerts using Amazon app. This is comparable to alerts from shopping
sites on Messenger Platform that Facebook launched last week at their
F8 conference.
IOT Design Simplicity extended to Commerce Experience
The
beauty of IOT devices compared to all tech innovations of the past is
how we are seeing simplicity in design and the good ones tie seamlessly
to a mobile App.
Amazon Dash Button is a simple button you can
stick anywhere on any appliance to remind you to order the refills. It
ties to the Amazon App and allows you to cancel your order giving user
the choice to do comparison shopping. This is such a subtle feature that
builds trust with users challenging them that Amazon has the best
price. It builds on Amazon's delivery convenience. It offers features to
track the purchase which all ties back to existing Amazon App.
Why this is win for Amazon and not any Retailer?
Amazon
owns the distribution of Prime customers where they have solved for the
delivery problem. Any other retailer will have the problem of
on-boarding users to adopt a new technology. And this ties seamlessly to
Amazon's inventory (for most cases). So they are deploying it for Prime
Customers only at launch, thereby strengthening the value of Amazon
Prime memberships.
Questions from a skeptical data mind
You know I love new innovations but also become schizophrenic trying to look at other sides
of every product roll-out. That's the best part I love working with
many different teams with multiple, smart viewpoints. The analyst in me wonders what Amazon data says (we'll never find this out) about the buying habit of people who buy consumables online. Do we go to Amazon to buy Diapers and end up purchasing lots of other stuff merchandized to us? Now will there be any cannibalization of such spending from users? It is possible that some product manager inside Amazon looked at this data and said, this is still the right thing for the customer
so lets do it and went ahead. Maybe they estimated the upside from the
scale of new purchases from the Dash button and the increased trust from
Prime customers offsetting this loss (if any).
Innovation Ecosystem - Dash Replenishment Service (DRS) for Device Manufacturers
Amazon offers a Platform API for device manufacturers called "Dash Relinquishment Service" to connect to leverage Amazon's authentication and payment systems, customer service, and fulfillment network.
Whirlpool
plans to offer re-ordering detergent. Brita is planning a connected
water filter that will measure water usage and re-order filters. Quirky
is planning a new connected device series called Poppy that offers a Pet
food dispenser, baby formula maker, pour-over coffee maker that can
measure usage and refills. Brother Printers will re-order ink cartridges
and paper refills. All of them plan to use Amazon's DRS service to
seamlessly order from Amazon.
Amazon has
left control with manufacturers to decide if they want to build in an
Amazon Dash like button in their device or bake the counting of usage
and ordering refill automated inside the device so they can manage their
own design for their brands while using DRS.
Are you as excited as me about this progress in IOT and Commerce? Share your thoughts in comments below.
F8, Facebook's annual developer conference shows a glimpse of
Facebook's innovation for its own products and for its ecosystem of
entrepreneurial developers and marketers. This year's F8 (Mar 25, 26) top announcements
are Messenger Platform and support for Internet of Things to connect to
Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg shared a vision of how Facebook is now a
set of apps on mobile and his team presented different innovations upon
different Apps.
Messenger and Parse for IOT ( Day 1) and Drones for Internet.org (Day 2) are the top announcements that excite me most because of the beautifully designed products and strategic business opportunities.
Here's a 3 min summary of Day 1 #F8 announcements. Read on as I share what it means for you as a user or as a business.
1. Messenger Platform
David Markcus made this *huge* and strategic announcement! Messenger has opened up APIs for developers to connect their Apps to Facebook Messenger App.
What this means: A.
Messenger can call other Apps seamlessly from inside Messenger which
allows users to share fun content like customized videos.
This
will allow us to create multi-media content (video, modified pictures or
fun annotations in video or pictures) using other apps and share within
messenger. The receiver will see the content but also a link for the
app that was used to create the content. This is similar to Applink, the
deep-linking capability Facebook added last year. But this is very
strategic for Facebook's business because now they can help other App
developers download more of their apps right from messenger (like they
offer with Mobile Ads) and can monetize it.
Another subtle
implication of this brilliant design is how Messenger will show top apps
to create new content for users. This is like Firefox showing a search
box and can decide which search engine they show as the top choice
driving traffic to that search engine. Now Facebook can impact the
ranking and distribution of Apps in that category or decide on a ranking
algorithm or charge for App developer to get more downloads and clicks.
B. Messenger can communicate to Businesses.
This
has a huge Commerce implication and also a strategic shift in Customer
Support facilitating 1:1 interaction with customers after a purchase.
When
you buy a jacket from Patagonia, you now choose to receive the receipt
via messenger. Then you can refresh the same message to track the
purchase and delivery of the item.
From a product design
perspective this means that the business becomes your 'friend' on
messenger and now has a 1:1 channel to communicate with you, their
customer. This brings a huge business opportunity for Facebook to
monetize this traffic, engagement, customer support and influencer
referral channels with businesses.
I am so excited about this!!! I'll play with the new Messenger Platform options and write a separate article.
2. Drone for Remote Internet Access from Internet.org
Facebook is building Drones for remote locations to hover at 60000 feet and provide Internet access. What this means -This is exciting because of the goodwill of bringing internet access to remote locations. Also the sheer audacity of the idea and execution is exciting showing us that Facebook has innovative people and gives them room to execute their ideas taking us on the ride with them and building trust on all their other offerings as an innovative technology company. Here's the Internet.org video showing the drones.
2. IOT for Parse
Ilya
Sukhar announced Parse for IOT (Internet of Things). They offer a
library for IOT devices and underlying chips of IOT like arduino to talk
to Facebook's Parse platform to send notification alerts.
What this means:
Parse
offers notification for mobile apps. Notifications are the alerts that
reminds us about products we wanted to buy, games where our friends have
out smartened us and email and message reminders, all bringing
engagement back to Apps.
Now developers can use the Parse IOT
library and send notifications from Internet of Thing devices to
Facebook apps. IOT devices have several sensors which send alerts to
companion apps. This offers the alert platform and saves developers the
trouble of building this server side component.
This also offers a
whole new feeds channel for Facebook and ties developers closely to
Facebook via the Parse Platform. e.g Chamberlain App offers an IOT for
your garage that can send an alert when the garage is open.
Here's an example code for a water planting IOT device shared on stage at F8 More details here
3. Facebook Analytics for Apps
App developers will have a single dashboard to see Ad campaigns results across all apps and all devices with detailed analytics.
What this means:
Developers
can understand how people in aggregate are using their Apps and make
informed decisions on targeting users, or improving app product flow.
For example cross device online Retailer Zulily is a Facebook beta
partner. They found that for every 10 men and 10 women coming in 4 women
add items to cart only 2 men added items to cart, then both men and
women get the same purchase conversation from that step forward. This is
analytics provided by Facebook. Zulily can use this insight and decide
whether to add more inventory for men or focus marketing on women or
take a different action to drive more revenues to their business.
3. Unified Social Login with new version of Comments Plug-In
Facebook comments on sites and on Facebook will continue seamlessly with a new Comments Plugin for websites.
What this means:
We
log onto several web sites and mobile apps using Facebook Login. The
conversation on an article stay on the web site, different from
conversation on Facebook on the same topic. Now the conversation on a
site (where we login using Facebook) will continue under the article
shared on Facebook.
This is a complex piece of privacy logic that
Facebook has implemented seamlessly. A comment on the web site will show
up on Facebook for all to see. A users' comments to articles shared by
friends in Facebook will show up on the site only if they allow for
public sharing else it will be visible on the site only for their
friends or friends of friends based on their setting.
This is a
useful feature and a complex one to create a seamless user flow, so it
is a good win for improved user experience from Facebook.
This is good for marketers as the conversations will not be fragmented and they can check holistic engagement of users.
Zuckerberg
shows a futuristic sneak peak of spherical video taken using 24 cameras
saying we can such videos on Facebook in the future. The announcement
was about the capability to share Facebook videos on external web sites.
What this means:
We
can now share Facebook videos one external web sites similar to how we
can put YouTube videos or Vimeo videos on our blogs or websites. Users
share 3Bil videos shared every day on Facebook. This will create more
video views and inventory for Facebook to potentially sell video Ads
competing with Google.
5. Audience Network
Last year
Audience Network launched for apps to monetize Apps. LiveRail also part
of Facebook, will manage mobile banner ads. Facebook calls it 'People
based approach' to monetization of user's audience network.
Its a crazy and fun day to be a Tech consumer!!! Meerkat (launched last week in SXSW) and Periscope (launched today Mar 26th) offer live video recording making anyone into a TV broadcaster.
People
are going crazy testing out video recordings while strangers watch,
follow and send hearts. The videos range from dogs, cats, wife making
soup, a girl offering to write any comment text in Chocolate as you
watch, traffic updates, night sky view from many places round the globe,
sleeping friends,.... I did a periscope of my garden and our dog and
got 14 live viewers in a minute. (See montage of Day1 of Periscope below)
The
funny one for me was this guy from Mexico who was talking non-stop and
switched topic to whatever words we typed in comments. He was talking
about bald head, dinosaurs as pet, and I said 'dry beans' and it was so
hilarious to see him switch the topic and he said "Dry beans... Are ...
Not Wet. The difference between dry beans and wet beans is ... moisture
...."
Products Innovating Live as we use it
Ruth Reader of Venturebeat has done a nice feature comparison
between Meerkat and Periscope. I like having two options. Competition
is good and will help drive good product features for both.
It is
early early days! Periscope archives the videos for 24 hours while
Meerkat does not. Periscope sends a stream of hearts allows us to click
the hearts and the broadcasters line up hearts building a Leader board.
Meerkat has a intuitive easy interface allowing us to find twitter
friends to follow and I got 76 followers even before my first video but
ran into crashes. Periscope got my video stream working right away after
a minor audio hiccup. Periscope is now owned by Twitter so they cut out
Meerkat's Twitter Social Graph access. Both have no parental control or
ways to tag or access or search videos live or archived. Yet.
Both
teams will iterate in typical silicon valley style (Meerkat is an
Israeli startup) to understand who their real customers are what are the
use cases to build upon.
Early Use Cases
1. Citizen Journalism
On a serious note, a building explosion in NY injured 30 people today.
Persicope video streams starting sending notifications live from the
scene instantly creating so many citizen journalists. Ben Popper of TheVerge wrote about how he saw periscope live video of the fire and his thoughts on evolving citizen journalism.
2. P2P Video Communication In
theory this is like Google hangout but with a super cool social
interface. So people could use it for video communication of families,
friends, events from around the globe. Meerkat looks like a video
version of Snapchat as the videos are not archived but there is the
added angle of 1 to many streaming adding interesting possibilities.
3. Real Time Events coverage/Activism
We cannot forget the fact that both of these apps are riding on Twitter
so the benefit we are seeing is all that we have seen and experienced
on Twitter. Activism, Events live stream bring global news and
communities together. People sharing live traffic updates etc are all
common on Twitter now available in video format as the world is moving
to videos.
4. Distance Education I am going as a
judge to UCSC "Social Partners" class on Saturday and plan to live
stream the students final presentations (hopefully students will be ok
with it). Live videos of educational seminars, classes are low hanging
fruits. Khan Academy was built on the backbone of YouTube, wonder if
there will be a real-time version of it next?
The sheer
diversity of possibilities and crazy ideas and being able to see the
world from the eyes of so many others is the most fun, intoxicating part
of this new real-time video broadcast from our mobile phenomenon.
Developer Ecosystem
Periscope founders in an interview to Product Hunt,
the product launch site have said a developer API is coming soon. You
can catch the periscope video of the interview for 24 hrs only from the
interview link.
Katch, a service calling itself "record button for
Meerkat" was launched last week at the heel of Meerkat which launch at
SXSW. You don't need to download a separate App. If you include the
words #katch in your Meerkat video titles Katch picks up the videos from
Twitter feeds and automatically uploads and creates a Youtube video.
(Note -This katch app is different from the Saas Ad platform Katch.com)
Nostalgia
Do
you remember Qik, they came up with the same concept of real time video
recording on iPhones before iPhone officially supported videos and
allowed us to upload to youtube and several sites as an option. I used
to have a channel on Qik and record local Silicon valley events and
video interviews live. Qik
sold for $100Mil to skype in 2011 and Skype absorbed the video cloud
platform technology and shutdown the consumer app in April 2014. Qik
connected to many different carriers globally and had amazing features
like video between two phones and store recordings for live watch by
followers on the web. Another one is justin.tv when
Justin Kan built a camera he wore on his head and livestreamed his life
and scaled it to a Y combinator company (also 2007).
Part of me
is nostalgic but if you are someone who has seen the Phoenix like
rebirth of technologies you will share my optimism that the Qik team
must be using their learning of technology problems solved to create
some other innovation and the new Meerkat and Periscope teams will do
something different with fresh new minds and we as consumers will find
some different killer apps aligned with times today.
Let me know
if you have tried Periscope or Meekat, Share your thoughts and some use cases you see
evolve.
I have been part of the amazing experience of geek innovation at Iosdevcamp hosted at eBay for the fourth year in a row.
The iosdevcamp is an intense community driven event with 500 developers coming together to pitch ideas and form teams and build and launch 70 new IOS Apps on Sunday night.
All the hardwork is done by the volunteer team lead by Dom, Raven and Christopher and Jennifer
This year I organized a girls mentoring program from eBay Women in Technology.
Businesses are struggling with how to evaluate the effectiveness of
their social media campaigns and several social media activities. Currently, most companies are using a
variety of metrics to measure diverse campaigns across multiple
departments. There are five
metrics that accurately measure success in terms of ROI and revenues
from social media for all enterprises, both big and small, B2B and
consumer web, and across multiple geographies.
I have outlined the issue with measuring this metric and interviewed some industry expert on what is the best practice today to arrive at each metric.
I need your valuable input now!
I am beginning the part 2 blog to outline the remaining two metrics.
I find that social media permeates businesses across all channels and we all have our view of it from our different corporate functions. In the end we all make money for our businesses while serving our customers and staying within ethical boundaries of the company and our own values.
So I find it fascinating at the discussions I got on the blog comments and Twitter on what people think about the remaining two metrics.
I had a recent experience with Cathay Pacific and want to share how Social Customer Service made a difference and some lessons for any business offering Social Service.
Cathay Pacific and me as a customer
First, I am fan of Cathay Pacific. I love flying on Cathay Pacific for my international travels. In the past, everytime I got to talk to a real customer service person on the phone or at the airport they were awesome. Service online is excellent.
However, web and phone which are traditional customer support channels fell short for Cathay Pacific support when I needed it this week.
1. Cathay's web site is functional but does not communicate well if something does not work because of a business rule. I ran into just that trap and began spinning my wheels early this week.
I changed my mother's Cathay Pacific ticket to a new date and could not get seat assignment done online. The online site told me I was eligible to get special seat assignment but gave no details.
2. Cathay Pacific has several local phone numbers for US and I recalled from my past interaction they have a separate number for eservice for tickets purchased online.
The eService number failed repeatedly saying the number does not work from the number I called (which was a local US phone I called from).
They have several local US numbers and the California number seems to work only from 9 am to 5pm California time. This number hung up on me saying there is large wait time everytime I called.
As a final resort I found Cathay Pacific has an international support number which is a Hong Kong number. I reluctantly called them as an international call staying up late at midnight my time. I had to choose several options which did not lead me anywhere.
Enter Social Media Customer Support
Frustrated and helpless, I did what I always do. I tweeted. I called out @cathaypacific and complained. My Twitter friends tweeted back empathizing saying it is bad if I had to do an international call for support.
Over the next 2 days I kept tweeting as I tried their various 800 numbers.
As I felt alone and helpless as the 800 numbers failed or hungup on me, I tweeted (see screenshot below). At it escalated I called out MarshaCollier who is the guru in Social Customer Service. So when my problem was solved Marha ReTweeted to her 42,000 followers.
@CathayPacificUS kept the engagement with me during this time. They sent me direct message on Twitter and found out that my ticket was of a particular class and hence I could get not get seat assignments. A twitter Direct Message in 140 characters could not solve my problem. I had more questions on why my ticket was of that class with the limitation.
But it served one purpose. It kept me engaged with CathayPacific. It did not make me lose faith in them as a brand. It did not encourage me to continue negative tweets.
They tweeted me saying a rep was going to call me and they did after a day. My ticket class type could get seat assignments only 48hrs before the flight time. This was never communicated to me on the web site or in my eticket. It was flaw in their online system, it was a flaw in their 800 numbers line management, it was a flaw in their communication to customers.
But this experience proved to me Cathay Pacific cared for me as a customer. They went out of their way to solve my problem. Thank You CathayPacific Twitter Support team.
Setting up Social Business Process for Social Customer Support
As I work in social media in a large company I wonder about these questions about Cathay Pacific:
1. How @CathayPacific and @CathayPacificUS are connected, what is their internal workflow to transfer a US customer complaint from their social listening platform?
2. Did they treat me differentlty in their Customer Service response because I had a large Twitter following? Or were they able to give such a response to all customers?
3. I wonder how they escalated across the Twitter Service and their regular phone reps to arrange for a rep to call me and I am thankful for that.
4. Calling a customer back is expensive, how would they measure the ROI of supporting me? I am happy and going to stay their continued customer and will likely tell a lot of others that Cathay Pacific is a good airline. Do they measure this differently or I was a spike in a call center cost because I was noisy on a social network?
5. Do they monitor their customer conversations and will my tweets add to the sentiments they track?
6. I have given valuable feedback on their online system that did not tell me my ticket class allowed me to get seat assignments only 48 hours earlier. I have given feedback on 800 numbers that do not work for US customers. Do they have a process in place to send my feedback to the correct departments? If so do they listen? Again, how do they measure the value of this customer feedback?
7. Now my perception of Cathay Pacific has changed from this cold website and 800 number to a personable brand with real people who care. Do they know and have a way to track the sentiment change of a customer served via
I am still pondering who are the kind souls behind the Twitter Support in Cathay Pacific, how many of them are there and did I make their job difficult and do they know how much value their support and that they have earned me back as more loyal customer back for their company and brand.
I have worked with Brand Managers and Marketing Execs on Facebook fan pages since its early days and have built brand pages for DEMO conference, AOL, PayPal, Intuit and several nonprofit brands. I want to share my experience here to help shape Google+ brand page experience to be better than that of Facebook fan pages and LinkedIn’s company pages today.
I have always loved Facebook fan pages but my heart goes out for its limitations. Facebook started with Groups then added fan pages, relaunched Pages and has adapted to growing demand from brands since then without (so it appears) a thorough customer study of enterprise brand processes and team roles.
So, Dear Google+ Team, I would like to offer these suggestions to help you create the best experience for brands. Please do not replicate the current Facebook Fan Page experience but build it based on a deeper understanding of customer use cases, roles and enterprise/team processes.
Top 10 consideration to building business brand pages:
10. Analytics is huge and Google+ team has made a great start in identifying analytics as one of the top two upcoming features. Please note that it is important to offer analytics from a brand’s perspective not replicate the Facebook insights offered in their pages today. Facebook added analytics after the fact and lot of Facebook insights are not actionable.
For example, Facebook analytics do not tie into a multi-channel campaign to compare how that channel is performing. So Google’s plans to connect your analytics to AdWords is a great start but please plan on a holistic approach to help us compare channels. Webtrends integrates Facebook Analytics by using Facebook API but it is not the same as offering an integrated analytics for multiple channels.
9. Facebook analytics for 'likes' when the fan page widget is embedded in a web page is awesome. This is a huge win for Facebook with their Open Graph Protocol. The metrics showing scale of growth of impressions is very important to get buy in for pilot projects before they scale social media ad budgets.
8. In Facebook for the longest time when a user creates a page, they became the admin and could not be removed (easily). Companies use agencies, students and consultants to create fan pages so the creator’s user profile has to be independent of the brand page once they are not associated with the brand or project. Facebook has since added this functionality and offers the page admin a choice to share feeds as two personas one as their consumer profile and one as the brand page. This gets confusing for people as they create and manage multiple brand pages and can be done with better usability.
7. Every brand has many pages for their main brand with several shared admin and several pages for brand extensions and different regions and languages owned by different groups inside the same company.
Please understand the roles of different players involved in the brand pages to set right access control. One admin adding many other admins in Facebook fan page as done today does not work for real enterprise social media teams. This will not come up easily in your market survey as this is a boundary condition and a pain of the social media guideline provider taking care of employees who transition out. Many social media pages have multiple employees as admins and not many brands worry about the liability of the ownership of the pages. They usually wake up to it one day. I have been part of the rush of many brands that go through a brand audit to check which of their pages are owned by someone inside their own company. Expect management time on your policy team’s part unless you build a self management module for a master admin for a large brand. LinkedIn company pages is a good example of adding company admins in one place.
6. Fan page today is not setup to run campaigns, this is a major design flaw in Facebook. I have experience running a campaign connecting Venture Capitalists and entrepreneurs on a Facebook fan page. It was difficult for users to engage on the page until they fan the page. Then based on the admin access of whether the fan can post pictures or videos etc users could engage with the page. This is reverse to how user engagement should be done by creating easy call for action, much like the web. So we cannot measure page views of users visiting a fan page untill they fan the page missing out on people who leave without becoming a fan.
At DEMO, we tracked fan count when VCs with large friend counts responded to an entrepreneur question on the Facebook fan page, which was DEMO’s real campaign goal. We had to track it manually and not in the Facebook fan page insight. So in summary, we need fan growth tracking on campaigns for a variety of campaign situations.
5. At AOL we had a scavenger hunt at events and got users to friend the fan page. At Intuit we had a different quiz game at conference booths to increase fans. These again were not trackable with direct metrics. So metrics should have several attributes - location, time, device and custom fields to be tracked by campaign manager. The campaign manager should be able to track the metrics based on the campaign goals of whether it is lead gen or engagement and define what that means for the particular brand. Palm Norchoovech from SAP says “We have several fan pages for different regions and languages and spend lot of time to sort the fans into multiple lists. If Google+ page can follow back all fans and sort them into groups automatically based on the criteria in their profile info (locations, languages, etc) it will save business page admins valuable time. Then, we can use only one business page for one brand and not multiple pages based on languages. It will allow admins to send updates to the right target fans.”
4. Sun Microsystems used fan pages to communicate with their base like a newsletter. We used this at DEMO minimally, although this again is not easy in Facebook fan pages. Communication in a company is done by a marketing communication or marcom team that is different from the brand page admin. The comms team makes the creative of the newsletter in HTML. But Facebook messaging for fan pages is primitive and non-HTML making it extra work for the admin to make a text of the message to update fans via Facebook Fan Pages. This should be improved with Google+ business pages. Google+ could integrate standard email programs directly instead of offering basic messaging options from brands to fans.
3. Facebook struggled with differentiating between Groups and Fan pages in the beginning, so some business were stuck in Groups unable to transition to pages. So Google+ should look very closely at Facebook Groups and Pages to understand the various brand profiles and use cases.
2. Branding the brand page is a killer need. I remember endless conversations within companies explaining how a brand name cannot be translated to a vanity URL. Worse is to beg friends inside the company to fan a page to get 100 fans (now 25 fans) to claim the fan page. This again is against standard enterprise behavior and worse is that leaves many employees as fans of the page influencing decisions of what consumers really want. You will need to ensure there are enough fans so there aren't empty brand pages. But why not get creative to allow brands to run campaigns to get fans as part of their fan page creation process?
1. I love how Google+ calls it Google+ pages for brands, bands and beyond.
Facebook allowed fan pages by real fans as an afterthought to allow for community of fans of a brand to maintain a fan page. This is good for me as a consumer and not an easy thing to accept as a brand. It offers a dichotomy of brand adoption and brand dilution in one.
So Dear Google+ team you cannot plan ahead for all kinds of pages types, so plan a flexible structure to adapt to change. Be prepared or Google’s loyalty will be torn between consumer groups and Google’s customers who will want to control the brands. I hope Facebook Pages team reads this and brings innovation to Facebook Fan Pages too. I join the many brands and social media enthusiasts as we wait for innovation in brand pages to truly bring social media to connect us to our customers to let our customers lead us.
Readers: Share your thoughts on what else you would add. Comment here or Tweet me @sujamthe
This seems the easiest to say but hard for many to follow. I am most happy when I am true to myself. I get my full potential when I follow my heart. This philosophy has led me to constant introspection of who I am, stay humble, keep learning and be honest to myself.
It has helped me in time management as I look at what I am doing, is it true to myself or do I feel butterflies in my stomach when I get ready to do something. I go all out in full bloom when I am myself and stick to jobs that bring out my passion for them, for teams and environments that help me be myself. I challenge myself if is this me often and see if I can expand myself better as a more open person.
2. People matter the most in life
I am a big extrovert, so I love meeting new people and helping them is so fulfilling. I have built a habit of tweeting out names of authors as I read articles or books I like, meeting new people all around me - coffee lines, strangers, friends of friends. I love finding ways I can help people unconditionally. I refer people to jobs or help anyone looking for connection to anyone else. Once I reminded a guy who tweeted to remind him to take beer out of his fridge in 30 minutes; I checkin on twitter if someone sounds sad or complains about their lack of sleep.
I learn so much from the new people I meet. I am surrounded by such positive energy from the people I interact daily. I am humbled by many conversations online and offline.
For example I found our cook in the PayPal cafe has traveled and lived in 7 countries and has amazing passion for various spices he uses in his daily cooking. The starbucks server Anahi got her name from a movie character her mom loved making me wonder about mothers, movies and brand names (which brings me back to my job and social media).
One thing I try hard and need to get better at is at staying in touch with my friends. Of all the people I meet many stick, social networks makes it easy for me to engage and stay connected but I struggle with staying in touch with a large inner circle of friends.
My network seems to expand not because I add new people to it but because I help them by connecting them as a habit and they get bonded well or work together and recall me when they meet, strengthening my network with them even when I am not in touch with each of the two as much the two I connected.
The people who impact us make us who we are, and the people we impact shape our world so it is such a blessing to be able to help and being helped by people.
3. Be Thankful
I have learned this recently. We all have so much to be thankful for. It gives us perspective to be respectful of people who helped, our jobs, our family, our mentors, our guides, our past colleagues, several people who set examples good and bad and guide us to be who we are.
I believe in paying forward and appreciate my early managers who have taught me the value of teamwork, several new friends who inspire me daily and help me stay on top of new technologies by their passion and innovation and for my family and friends who let me be myself.
Thanks to BenParr for getting me started to think about my philosophy.
I was happy to be immersed by smart product managers all day long with awesome sessions and learning.
My panel was called "Social Media Listening for Product Managers". I hosted this along with Stephanie Shum, Yahoo! Mail Product Manager and Van Riper of Google.
Below is the slide deck we shared.
Here is my learning from Pcamp and my session:
1. Yahoo uses http://suggestion.yahoo.com to gather feedback from existing customer base of 270Mil users with 5/7 PMs listening. 2. You listen and then decide how you prioritize the features. 3. Social Media listening tools are evolving, people are hungry for such tools so they can filter around specific products. 4. I met PMs from many companies and it is a real issue that the company has to be ready to be transparent from the highest level. 5. I am pleasantly surprised to hear about Tweetchats, how several people are hosting tweetchats and learn about tools for it.
Cindy Solomon hosts weekly Product Manager Talks weekly over Twitter at 4pm pst. Follow her at @prodmgmtalk She co-hosts this with her host from Australia and is developing the science behind Tweetchats for companies. I also learned about Twitter chat
for B2B marketers Use hashtag #B2BChat@B2B_Chat . Check it out weeklty thursdays at 5pm pst.
It was good to see all the local community and product management influencers.
Thanks to the tweetwall by @socialping we could engage the larger community via Twitter.
I want to share my list of geekiest tech activities at SXSW as I am making sense of it all. So all your own suggestion in the comment if you think I am missing something cool!
My own panel is on Sat at 3.30pm at The Hyatt with the awesome Dave Peck (details below). Hope I'll see you there, else ping me on Twitter. I plan to be at Tweethouse friday evening and livestream interesting peeps at PayPalX #Livebytes channel, so let me know about interesting people to cover!!! Best way to reach me is Tweet me @sujamthe
Sudha's Recommended List of SXSW sessions and talks (not all parties covered) ================================================================= Thurs 3/10
7pm: Girls in Hack e 6th St, Austin, TX
3/11 Friday:
2 to 5pm Tweet House Sponsored by Chevrolet from (several panels) then party at 5pm by Steve Broback at 501 Studios – 501 I-35, Austin, TX, 78702 9pm “American Express Presents the Tweet House After Dark” party will feature iPad D.J. Rana Sobhany (I've heard @rana at Iosdevcamp last summer she is awesome) (#chevytweethouse, #sxsw details: http://bit.ly/h6Vl2E)
Sun 3/13 10am to 4pm: Ebay SpeedHackat Lucent Alcatel Lounge, Room 406 4th floor Hilton All Day: DogPatch labs Treehouse Pub 501 E.6th Street. Startups go an make a pitch there. 1pm to 6pm: Google Developer event (several sessions) (at Speakeasy 412 Congress Ave at w 5th · Austin, Texas) 5pm: Boston in Austin Tweetup at Fado at 214 W 4th (updated new) 7pm to midnight: League of Extraordinary Hackers/SHDH@SXSW by Chris Messina & Boris Smus 10pm+: Red Laser Party with Chromeo
Tues 3/15 11am What’s In Your Virtual Wallet at Town Lake Ballroom, Radisson, Town Lake Ballroom by Richard Brewer Haye, Laura Chambers and Red Laser's Rob Veres
========= Closing remarks: Let me know if I am missing any event thats a must-attend and I'll add it here.
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