During a conversation with a colleague this week, I pointed out that I am not actively subscribed to any podcasts anymore.  I told him it is not because I don’t enjoy the content, but I never plug my mobile devices into a computer anymore to sync up.  His response was perfect, “What do your habits say about the future of the internet and computing?”.

That same day, the New York Times published an article detailing Google’s interest in web TV and partnering with Sony and Intel to get there.  If  I think about my own habits and the people around me, I think they are in the right direction and can transform the internet, social media and computers into something that is seamlessly integrated into our lives.

Let me explain my habits and maybe it will help provide context to my opinion.  I am not an early adopter, I don’t try every new toy as they come onto the market(I was never in the “cool crowd” and am still not).  I don’t sign up for every new website when they are launched(I do read about them).  I sit in front of a computer for work most of the day, but don’t use social media at work.  I use my smart phone to connect to people, twitter, facebook and any other social tool I am subscribed to.  I come home after a long day and relax, unwind and watch tv, but am loathe to open my computer because that was work.  Any additional social contacts I make are done through my cell and that is it.

In comes Google with an understanding that I am an average user and don’t want to connect wires to computers to sync everything.  I don’t want to have four devices open in front of me at a time.  They understand that I am not getting rid of my TV habit, but am willing to part with my computer.  They understand that if a cell phone suits my needs for my social interactions, that a supped up TV would be even better(font size, speed and general comfort would all be increased).

They are essentially integrating tools into our everyday habits instead of introducing tools that force us to change our human behavior.  Computers have only been mainstays in our homes since the early 90′s ( Yes, many early adopters had computers at home since the early 80′s) and during the last 20 years they have constantly evolved.  The constant evolution has changed the way we interact with them, making it nearly impossible to hard wire computers into our daily routines.  If I polled people on how they used the computer in 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005 and 2010 I bet we would have 5 different answers float to the top.

On the other hand, TV’s and phones have been part of our lives since the 1950′s for TV and 1870′s for the telephone and their basic functions have never changed.  Phones still call people and TV still displays broadcast and cable shows.  Abstractly, phones are used to connect to people and TV’s are use to get away from work and other daily routines.

As I understand it today, the future of the internet, social media and computers are not in new gadgets, websites or apps that early adopters latch onto, but in regular household mainstays that enable a seamless use of all the different media and essentially unchanged routines.

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I have been an avid reader of FlowingData ever since I stumbled across it.  Every day, Nathan posts about some new visualization or data set that we should look at.  Today, Nathan launched your.flowingdata.com and I am really impressed with the amount of work he put into it.  The idea behind your.flowingdata is that you can track, trend and visualize your own habits.  The one catch is that you need to direct message these actions to @yfd.  

For all those out there that are interested in data visualizations, FlowingData is a great place to start.  If you have a twitter account and are trying to track how much you eat, when you sleep or whatever else you want to track give your.flowingdata a try.  

I’ll be honest, I am horrible at logging the minute details of my life, but I am debating doing it now!

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On Friday, I sat down with someone I work with who made a prediction that someday soon there will be a backlash from all the time spent using twitter.  His argument was that he doesn’t see the value of these interactions during office hours and that it seems like a distraction from the work at hand.  During our conversation I defended social media, especially twitter, but I have been thinking about it ever since.

I believe that interacting with people in your field is very helpful to accomplish daily goals related to work.  I also believe that interacting with people outside of your field can help give perspective to the same goals.  Here is where I am having trouble: is a constant stream of interactions from both groups at the same time helpful?  Especially when they are trying to feed you new articles and videos and enticing things to view.  Personally, I follow all the “cool” tweeple like @MackCollier and @guykawasaki, but I am not in PR and am not a full time entrepreneur.  I follow tech superstars too, but is my colleague right? Is all of this just a distraction from my day job?

With my MBTI training and my post on extroverts vs. introverts still fresh in mind, today I will defend social media as an outlet an extrovert needs to be successful at all times.  I am an extrovert and sitting in an office by myself or working at home can seem draining.  I need to know there are people out there talking.  I may tune them out. I may listen in here or there, but that chatter keeps my mind revved.  The little tweet notifications from TweetDeck don’t always drive me to see what’s going on, but it reminds me that I am not the only one connected.  I feed off of the 140 character bites that my friends give me and use that energy to deliver good work.  

Of course there are situations where I already have a lot of going on around me and my focus is being tested.  In those cases, I turn off TweetDeck and disconnect from the social media world, but I have a feeling I am not the only one to do this.  

So, is social media a distraction?  You tell me.  Do you find social media takes away your focus from work or do you feed off the buzz like I do?  Is your MBTI type preference for introversion or extroversion?  Do you think it makes a difference?

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As I mentioned in my first post, Starting Over, I am trying to stay focused on topics that are applicable to small businesses.  Last week I posted about the pyramid structure and internal operations of large and small businesses, today I am focusing on external relationships and operations.  Specifically, customer relationship management tools and the need for them to be integrated with social media.  Social media has changed the jobs of customer service reps, sales people, publicists and business owners everywhere, but I don’t think they are equipped with the right tools to handle it.

In today’s world, customers don’t only interact with companies via phone and email, many companies also have twitter accounts, blogs, forums and online communities.  This means when a business is trying to understand how connected a customer is with the company, it has to do a lot of investigating to get the full picture.  Companies like Salesforce.com, 37 Signals, Act, Epiphany, all have CRM systems to track customer activities, but they haven’t integrated with social media yet.

Over the last year, progressive companies hired community managers to try and get a handle on and participate in the overall conversation.  This is a very important part of social CRM, but the process shouldn’t stop there.  If the community manager is responding to a yelp review or a blog post or a tweet, this should all be recorded under the customer’s profiles.  Right now it is left as an unrelated interaction.  This means if the customer called customer service there would be no record of the interaction with the community manager under his or her profile.

Because of this disconnect, I am putting together a list of things that I think CRM tools should come equipped with.

1. The most important change is language.  Most CRM systems see customer interactions as inquiries or sales or marketing touches.  They don’t converse, because that isn’t the goal.  Most systems goals are based around getting a customer to purchase or to appease them when they call.  Social media is about information sharing and participating in the conversation, which is a different bucket.
2. Each customer needs a place for their blog under their record.  Ideally, the system would subscribe to the feed and alert the reps if something was written about the company or a relevant topic.  If the rep responds to the post in a comment this should be part of the history.
3. A built in twitter updater and reader.  This means that the customer service reps will need twitter accounts, but that should be a requirement, or highly recommended, for all reps.
4. Each customer needs a place for their twitter account.  Similar to the blog, the system should follow the person and send an alert if the company was tweeted about.  In this case the conversation should be recorded, including the back and forth replies as well as any DMs.
5. The system should be subscribed to search feeds like socialmention.com to constantly find new customers and handles being used to talk about the company.  The system should create new customers automatically to track interactions with these customers/handles.

After putting these 5 points down, I realize this might be a running conversation and I hope we’ll come out with a full set of requirements to build the next generation CRM tool.

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My experiences over the last few days, working with 3 drastically different companies has made me realize that smaller and flatter companies with an eye on innovation are better equipped to survive this recession than larger pyramid structured ones.  

Companies with many layers of middle management are at a disadvantage in this climate, because they take longer to make decisions and execute them.  This pyramid structure breeds a culture where the staff is trying to move up the ladder, not run the business.  The company follows the CEO’s direction and maybe a handful of other executives that are part of the inner circle.  The problem comes when the company needs drastic and quick change.  If there are ten levels of management it might take two months to trickle down to the people that are actually executing.  After the two months, I am willing to bet the instructions are completely different than those the CEO gave.  Remind you of a game of “telephone”?

On the other hand, in small businesses people are more inclined to know what everyone’s specialties are and go directly to the source when things need to get done.  If the small business sees numbers tanking compared to last year, they can analyze, devise plans, adapt and move forward before the large corporation even moves an inch.  Maybe this idea of small business that I am describing is more of an entrepreneurial environment, but it is surely a more effective mode of communication and operation.

Some might argue that social media can bring this flexibility to larger corporations, flatten out their structure and change their communication styles, but today I am a cynic.  I think that companies where the culture is driven by people who are “in the know” are not inclined to use or adopt blogs, twitter, social networks or any tool that is meant for collaboration.  They actually fear them because they cannot control the conversation.

In contrast, entrepreneurial small businesses live for that one good idea that will push them over the edge.  For them, sharing ideas between staff members is expected and communicating with customers is desired.  This is why social media is a set of tools that small business can use to overtake their corporate competition, not the other way around.  Look at how Gary Vaynerchuk of Winelibrary used social media to grow his wine business.  He didn’t spend millions of dollars mass marketing, he figured out a way to interact with a new audience of potential customers. 

I am not a right wing conservative, but I do believe that it is the small businesses that test out new ideas and share information with their staff and customers that will not only survive this downturn, they will also grow.  Its this idea that motivates me to learn about the new gadgets, sites and tools that come out every day so I can recommend them to my clients and friends to enable them to succeed.  The top of my list recently has been open source tools(I love wordpress, mysql, openoffice), hosted services (basecamp, centraldesktop, google apps, amazon web services, salesforce) and social media( blogs, twitter, facebook, linkedin, ning, friendfeed).  

What’s on your list?

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One of my goals for this year is to manage my personal brand better than I did in 2008.  So to accomplish this goal, I have decided to start blogging for this domain instead of chocolatecubed.com.  I have changed my email address to go to jordansalvit.com and I have changed my twitter account to @jordansalvit.  You’d think I really love my name.

I have also decided to attack this site as a project that I am dedicated to and want to succeed.  I got my feet wet with chocolatecubed.com, but now I am ready to jump into the pool!

As part of this move, I am committing to posting more frequently and talking about more substantive topics.  I will of course rant about an opinion of mine, but I am aiming to make that less frequent.  I have already planned a couple of posts for the coming days and weeks, including one on what I have learned as an ENTJ, another on how twitter and social media has changed the face of marketing and another one on Customer Relationship Management tools that need to adapt to this new social world.

I hope you join me as I start over and continue learning about myself, social media, AI, marketing, the world we live in and of course the people we interact with.

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