I recently had the opportunity to attend a Monona Terrace Wright Series Lecture. Although traditionally the topics are on architecture and sustainable design, the subject was extended to include sustainable product design. Trek Bicycle’s Industrial Design and Product Manager, Michael Leighton, was the speaker covering the sustainability efforts in the design and production of their latest urban utility bike the “Belleville.” With my focus on product management, new product innovation and social media use in product development, I couldn’t resist. I also have a passion for biking and support the premise that more people biking for fun and transportation could in fact help us with a number of greater issues such as pollution and the drastically overweight population of the USA. My other purpose was to understand where and how Trek might have employed social media for research, product validation, product improvement, or product promotion in the launch of the Belleville. [Read more...]
Building a better bike involves analysis and understanding your consumers
Global Social Media Consultancy Forms-Social Business Consulting Group
On Monday, March 14, 2011 it was announced that Social Business Consulting Group, a global social media consultancy launched with 17 founding partners. I am proud to say that I have joined as one of the founding partners. I bring manufacturing, professional services and technical product experience to the team blended with social media, social selling, product management and engineering expertise. [Read more...]
Pizza and Social Media – A powerful taste
Doug Tangwall and I work on a lot of things together including End Result Marketing where we find creative ways to integrate nurture marketing
and social media for business clients. Doug is a nurture marketing strategist, market researcher and even better - a gifted writer. When he said he wrote a post on his blog on the @IansonState happenings, and needed my review for social media context, I was ready. After reading it, I just had to share it with my audience as well. This version is adapted and shortened from the original but go to Pizza and Social Media Can Bring the World Together to read the entire story. I added several picture embellishments from my last visit to Ian’s Pizza. [Read more...]
The Social Technology Cloud
The level of confusion around technology and technology definitions is increasing. The Social Media Academy together with Xeesm worked on a way to resolve confusion and help explain the major pillars of the Social Technology Cloud.

Social Networks
Social Networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, Xing and many others serve a variety of purpose in business as well as private lives. They become instrumental in an engagement to create a better customer experience as it allows to meet and to listen to customers where they are. However Social Networks are not exclusive to sales and marketing teams to connect with clients.
Online Communities
While Online Communities had some ups and downs in the past, they will become a strategic play in a companies customer engagement strategy. All businesses will very soon want to provide a dedicated platform for their customers to meet and converse online – way above and beyond the classic support communities. While market leaders including Lithium, Jive and Ning will need to improve their community offering to serve a broader customer spectrum including SMB companies, online communities are an integrated part of a social business engagement.
Social Media Monitoring
A whole different type of solutions are Social Media Monitoring products. While most started out to identify sentiments in the market and learn what customers saying about their brand, Social Media Monitoring became a strategic solution in lead generation and opportunity identification. Social Media Monitoring tools help feed CRM and Social CRM systems and continue to be paramount to monitor brand attitude and brand value. Leading brands include Alterian/Techrigy, Scoutlabs (Lithium), Radian6 or Sysomos and many others. New applications in the SMM field will include influencer identification, business partner monitoring and other more granulate ways to better understand the needs of a given ecosystem.
Social CRM / Social Relationship Management
SRM and SCRM systems are again different beasts. They are built to help teams actively engage with customers, prospects and partners as well as other market constituencies. Sales Teams, Marketing Teams, Product Managers, Service Teams don’t ‘live’ in the SRM or SCRM tool but use it to quickly reach to their contacts and focus on specific objectives or goals while still socializing. SCRM and SRM tools provide the bridge between the external social web and internal systems. While a customer may never have direct access to an ERP or CRM system, they should have access to a Social CRM system. And like the traditional CRM systems also SCRM systems need to have functionality such as Forecasting, Opportunity Management and provide some work flow guidance to the sales, marketing or support teams. Market leader Xeesm.com and young companies like SocioToco or Gist try to enter this market with dedicated solutions to support business teams in their challenge to create a better customer experience.
Social CRM is a solution that supports a “Business Strategy” (not a social crm strategy) that most likely is set to create a better customer experience measured by increased advocacy for brand, products and services. Social CRM needs to interface with Social Networks, Social Media Monitoring, Branded or non branded online communities on the outside and traditional IT on the inside. Only if the actual customer has access to that Social CRM system, the attribute ‘Social’ is appropriate.
Tools
In addition to the four major pillars of the Social Technology Cloud there is a large offering of tools. Currently more than 5,000 tools support the above core systems and many of the core systems establish themselves as platforms to support and host those tools.
An industry in the making
The Social Technology Industry will be a Billion Dollar industry by end of this year. While the majority of the revenue is generated through advertising and sponsorships, many of the services and tools for professional usage is sold as subscriptions or consulting services and trainings.
Using the Xeesm dispatcher and preparing data | SocialCRM

- Image via Wikipedia
I am continuing to chronicle my various efforts to use Xeesm and its business applications to replace my last ‘tool’ which was ACT!. I am a Xeesm Business Partner for the Upper Midwest.
My previous post covered data uploads and some of the mistakes that I made, before I finally had my big initial data upload complete. There are some additional nuances that I learned after that last post.
Clarifications on Tip 1: Export your contacts into a spread sheet prior to uploading into Xeesm.
- Create CSV file
- Decide ahead of time the category for the contact and create a column for that designation
- Consider contact level (prospect, client, partner, affiliate etc) also add a column
- Create your empty flights ahead of time and grab the identifying FLIGHTID and also add that in a column
- Xeesm filters out the duplicates and non-email address/name combination (does it in the background) – After you upload your file, it show in the dispatcher if the email address is missing or not valid.
- No need for clean up the spread sheet prior to the upload
Clarification Tip 2: Uploaded into Dispatcher
- You can edit in the dispatcher the email address and update it
- Or just leave it in for cleaning up later
- Duplicates will not be processed, user will only get 1 invitation
- You can edit the notification message or not send it at all.
Last but not least
Clarification Tip3: Once in the dispatcher there are some symbols that are not explained well.
- ? – Contact is in Xeesm but not activated his account yet
- Check box – contact is using and active in XeeSM
- Blank – contact is not in the database yet, a totally new user.
What was your social engagement this week? Could you have been more productive using a tool like Xeesm?
Related articles by Zemanta
- Xeesm 2020 – The fast track to social business (slideshare.net)
- Entering Contacts in my Xeesm Edge | Success with SocialCRM (wendysoucie.com)
- Social CRM strategy – counterproductive (customerthink.com)
- How to prepare for a conference using social business engagement – Xeesm (customerthink.com)
- It’s a bird, it’s a plane! No, it’s Social Media Super-consultant! (wendysoucie.com)








