antonybrydon

Taking sides with GetSatisfaction

GetSatisfaction is working to become the Switzerland of customer service, a neutral intermediary between warring factions of customers and companies on the CS battleground. They're off to a good start, with 413K unique visitors per month and a good set of investors (O'Reilly Alphatech Ventures, Jeff Clavier's SoftTechVC, First Round Capital).

It's an interesting experiment. I'm paying close attention, because it challenges one of the lessons I've learned: serve a single master and take a side.

At Visible Path, we tried to simultaneously serve the sales representative and the sales manager. The goals of these two audience were often different, the tensions often significant, and it was difficult to serve both. Ray Lane at Kleiner Perkins often depicted the struggle in pictures like this:

Watch out, Salesforce & Oracle (SAP invests in LinkedIn)

Salesforce.com and other enterprise application vendors already have LinkedIn on their radar as a potential partner opportunity, but might want to consider plotting LinkedIn in the 'threat' quadrant of their SWOT analysis as well. With their recent investment in LinkedIn, SAP has made a good and decisive move to stay ahead of the pack and guard against this double-edged sword.

The threat emerges because business networking and the social graph may prove more valuable than process automation owned by the enterprise application vendors, and business networks may become the logical and best platform for enterprise applications. If this happens, enterprise application vendors will lose the mind share and ownership of the end-user. In enterprise deals, these enterprise application vendors could find a new player at the table or, in the worst case, they could lose strategic control of the account.