antonybrydon

Privacy is still a Problem (we're not over it)

Back in 1999, Scott McNealy of Sun famously told a group of reporters and analysts "You have zero privacy. Get over it."

At the same time Josh Harris launched his human fishbowl experiment "We Live in Public," which eerily anticipated today's era of Twitter and Facebook. The story has recently been made into a movie I'm hoping to see.

When Jeff Patterson and I started Visible Path (now Hoovers Connect) in 2003, privacy concerns often dominated in personal and professional circles, and we built more and more features in the software to safeguard privacy.

Today, as folks broadcast more and more of their lives publicly, I've wondered if attitudes and concerns about privacy had markedly shifted. To check, I ran a quick market survey and was surprised by some of the results:

People are still very concerned about privacy
Across the board - gender, marital status, geographic location, and occupation, people were very concerned about privacy. The bullets below refer to the percentage of folks that ranked themselves as "very concerned" about a topic, the highest level on a 5 point scale:

• 34.9% of all parents were “very concerned” (top box) about “inappropriate info about my child appearing online”

• 31.7% of all respondents were “very concerned” about “Inappropriate info about me appearing online”

• 42.6% of all respondents were “very concerned” about “My personal information being collected and sold”

• 33.7% of all respondents were “very concerned” about “Undesirable info about me appearing in search results”

Younger people are as concerned as older people
prevailing wisdom seems to be that younger generations are not only more comfortable with new technologies, but less concerned about privacy, but this wasn't supported by the data. Although concern did increase modestly in older demographics, concern in the 17-24 year old group was still high:

Salesforce.com's ServiceCloud rises above the crowd

 Salesforce.com announced ServiceCloud earlier this month, billed as a "next generation platform for customer service," allowing companies to monitor and tap into customer conversations all over the web - i.e., Facebook, community blogs, message boards, twitter, etc.

It's an excellent innovation, and important on several dimensions:

• For companies, it's a badly needed interface to a social web that consumers are increasingly turning to discuss products and companies, a structured way of integrating traditional CRM and ad hoc initiatives on platforms like Twitter. It's also an opportunity to create a better experience, better brand, and stronger net promoters cores by delivering a new level of proactive customer support.

• For consumers, it offers a new opportunity to be heard and helped in their preferred avenue, and not forced through the company's preferred CS channels and painful 800 numbers, and reflects a shift in the balance of power from company to consumer.

• For salesforce.com, it allows them to bridge an increasingly relevant social web with enterprise CRM, to keep CRM core and central and the sales and support, and to rise above (and aggregate) a crowd of  new channels emerging for customer support like GetSatisfaction and Twitter.

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.

Solving the passive vs active contribution problem

I've been wrestling with this problem for a few years, I'm curious to see how Adaptive Blue's new Glue product tackles it. The problem focuses on how to adequately manage privacy concerns when user information is passively contributed to a community or social network.

In active contribution, it's pretty straightforward. I may actively bookmark an article on delicious, actively share a post on friendfeed, actively add a connection on LinkedIn, actively post my whereabouts on Twitter. The systems have different privacy options (keep private, restrict to your connections, make public, etc), but since this functionality is often difficult to understand, and often keeps changing (along with privacy policies) the general rule of thumb seems to be to only actively post what you comfortable being public.

Can communication patterns offer sales insight?

We spent a lot of time at Visible Path building tools that helped individual sales reps sell more effectively. Lately, I've been working on determining what, if any, critical insights can be drawn by analyzing different communications patterns inside and between companies. Here's a quick survey for folks in sales management...