The definition and very nature of contact information is changing.
Why is this important? If you are not able to connect with people, you cannot sell to them, you cannot recruit them, you cannot market to them. As I talked about in the video intro, things are changing. If there was a contact information historian, it would be me.
What gets me irritated is when something gets reported as the “next best thing”, when in reality, it is simply, the next, extremely predictable innovation in a continuum. In this blog, I’m going to play part historian, part reporter and part futurist as it relates to contact information. When the “next big thing” happens, and I’m including social networks, you probably won’t be surprised.
First, a definition is in order. What is Contact Information? I define it as:
“an information venue that facilitates communication with a person”
Why am I spending my time doing this? My day job is steering the ship at Broadlook Technologies. Broadlook provides technology that empowers sales and recruiting professionals with contacts at corporations. To stay ahead, we must innovate. To innovate, we must research. To research we must watch, listen, learn, explore and dream a little.
One interesting aspect about contact information is that very rarely does a new form replace an old form. For example, with the advent of SMS (or texting) people are still using email; perhaps not as much, but they are using both. Even faxes have not been fully replaced by email. In some cases, legal wants the paperwork. Take it a step farther and faxes are not enough and good old paper mail is still being used. What does that mean?
1. The nature of new venues of contact information is additive.
2. New venues lead to more specialized usage of existing venues.
3. The nature of contact information must be part of system design.
Why is this stuff, in turn, important? Example: If you are designing a CRM for holding contact information and you “hard code” (design something inflexible) to store phone, fax, email and that’s it…big problem. Each time a new type of contact information is created, a hard-coded CRM would have to be updated and reprogrammed. Some may think that a SaaS model overcomes this, but it does not. A good CRM will have the changing nature of contact information built into it’s design and not solve it with revisions.
“A good CRM will take into account the changing nature of contact information and design for that nature from the start and not solve it with revisions.”
What happened today is about 1 chance in 84 Billion. Here is what happened.
I was using the URL shortening service http:\tr.im. This service takes a long URL and shortens it into something manageable. The utility of the service is that you get a short URL which can be used on venues such as Twitter, where every character counts.
In fact, I was going to tweet about a new product, Contact Capture for the iPhone. The latest iPhone is the 3GS. I typed in the long URL, as shown in the picture below.
Next, I pressed the [TR.IM] button and got the following:
If you haven’t picked it up, the iPhone is the 3Gs, the trimmed URL is “x3Gs”
Now for the fuzzy (very fuzzy math)
There are approximately 96 usable ASCII characters. ASCII is the characters on your keyboard plus a few more (A-Z, a-z and 0-9, etc) . There are about 96 usable ones that the TR.IM service can use.
With 4 unique characters in the URL, that means there are 96 * 96 * 96 *96 combinations or 84,934,656 combinations.
This itself is interesting, but the fact that the URL was for an iPhone 3Gs we have to look at this question: Of all trimmed URL’s, what percentage are for iPhone related content? I am going to be conservative and sale 1 in 1000.
So 84 million multiplied by 1000 is one in 84 billion.
The bottom line is that this was a coincidence, it made me smile and I thought I would share it.
If the Blackberry link included something like a Blackberry model number, I would be heading out to buy a lottery ticket…no such luck.
This all made me think about Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Outliers. One of the concepts I gathered was, basically, when opportunity knocks, you need to take advantage of it. Sometimes an opportunity is one in 84 billion.
I’ve had some recent fun with Tag Clouds. These are the sections of blogs that show the most frequently used words in blog postings; the most used words are shown in larger text, less frequent in smaller text.
Tag clouds are great summary tools. In my next presentation at the Specialized Information Publishers Conference in DC, I am presenting on The 7 laws of Internet List Generation. I thought it would be fun to start the talk with the first slide that shows a Tag Cloud of the most frequently used words in the PowerPoint presentation.
For about two years now, I’ve been getting calls to act as a consultant for several of my clients. Normally, this is not my role. My role at Broadlook, historically, has been envisioning the business logic behind a technology solution, building the product, and then evangelizing the hell out of it.
Sales and recruiting teams, in 22 countries, are power users of Broadlook software solutions. They are thinking of new ways to leverage technology that I dreamed up…in ways I never dreamed of. Cool. They are creating their own internal Broadlook corporate training classes, building corporate wiki’s and flying Broadlook Black Belt trainers on-site for advanced training classes. Very cool.
Here is what bugs me: They are not talking! Many clients see the Broadlook tools as a confidential trade secret and an integral component of their business process. So they won’t talk about what they are doing. Not cool at all.
“Data normalization” is a phrase that leaves a blank stare on most peoples faces. Here is a secret: it is really simple.
Here is the inside scoop: Technology people have a secret club, complete with handshake and everything. It’s a club that we don’t want outsiders in. So we create these long phrases that make peoples eyes glass over. Why? Because if everyone understood what we do, then we wouldn’t make the big bucks. Being a recovering technologist, I’m on a continually journey to lose my geek speak. So get ready, here is the skinny on Data Normalization (more…)
Most CRM implementations fail. This is a fact. Look it up.
In my years in the industry, I’ve worked with many vendors on the consulting side to help reduce the possibility of CRM failure. While there is a whole host of reason that failure occurs, I have a very unique perspective into one of those reasons. The Nature of Contact Information.
The nature of contact information is fairly finite (i.e. Company, URL, Name, Title, Email, Phone, Social Network membership, etc). In addition, the concept of contact information is a simple one to grasp. It is so simple, in fact, that if often gets overlooked.
One of the most important concepts in business is “be brilliant at the basics”. If you are brilliant at your basics many more complex processes will fall naturally into place. So how are you treating contact information?
The miss-handling of contact information can lead to dire consequences across your company.
Take the following work flow as an example: (more…)
