Small Business Trends: I would love to get a little bit of your back ground before we jump into the whole area of where we are today with customer collaboration.

John Hernandez: Sure, my background has been, for the last 15 or 16 years, customer service contact center application development.  Now, more importantly, it’s in the collaboration space with customer collaboration from B2C to B2B communication.

Small Business Trends: Maybe you can tell us where things stand in regards to what customer collaboration means today.

John Hernandez: The four key areas we see really driving change are:

• The whole explosion of mobility.
• The use of video as a collaborative tool between businesses and customers.
• The whole area around virtualization and how you can virtualize not only the desk top for your employees, but also in the Cloud for application use.
• The use of social and how you incorporate that into collaborating with your customer base.

Small Business Trends: How has collaboration changed since the smart devices have come out, and social networks have really proliferated, now that everybody is actually on them?

John Hernandez: Just the explosion of those devices have enabled a whole new application development area around how companies communicate and collaborate with their customers. Embedding collaborative tools right inside of an app now is pretty straight forward.  You can escalate that application use into a collaborative video interaction, a chat, an email, an SMS or a phone call, and have full context and transparency as well as policy and security built in.  So that is really starting to take off in the mobile space.

Small Business Trends: Are we now in the age of the collaboration center when it comes to customer service?

John Hernandez: I fully believe so and not just the core contact center agents, CSRs as they are sometimes called, but also subject matter expertise inside of the broader corporation is getting engaged with customers.

Small Business Trends: How are tools like the Cloud enabling this transformation to a collaborative experience?

John Hernandez: One piece of the cloud is all around social. Not only are consumers realizing that social is the back door to many companies, meaning that they do not have to navigate the call center but can simply send something out, either a Facebook post that’s publicly accessible or Tweet or a LinkedIn post or Yelp or whatever it might be.

Then the other piece from the corporate perspective is just accessing these applications.  They are changing very rapidly using a cloud format to absorb that technology change.

Small Business Trends: What are some of the new challenges being brought on by this environment?

John Hernandez: Expectations every quarter, it seems, are raised to a new bar with a new device coming out or a new application being seen as the latest and greatest from our consumer world. As that continues to accelerate, it does put pressure on to understand which of those things are important from the customer service perspective.

Small Business Trends: Do you think that the customer service agents job is more challenging today?  Or is it about the same, just different challenges?

John Hernandez: I think it’s getting more fun. I have seen a rise in agent satisfaction where they are actually happy to use some of these things like Facebook and Twitter. Now, from managing all of the interactions and multitasking, there are definitely some folks that prefer to be single interaction focused.  So I think it is up to employers to understand the skills of their employees and put them into the right role to do their work. But for the most part, I have seen a rise in people having fun in the job these days.

Small Business Trends: Are you hearing from your customers if the philosophy of collaborations vs. the call center is seeing tangible benefits at this point?

John Hernandez: I was talking to a customer about how they’re surveying customers differently now, using social to get un-filtered feedback on customer satisfaction, or using SMS text messaging in the simple way of getting quick feedback from their customers. The days of a long survey and email, or long voice prompted IVR input on surveys; those things are starting to diminish from what we see. Very quick interactions are behind a rise in both net promoter score as well as customer satisfaction.

Small Business Trends: What are the big benefits to the actual end user?

John Hernandez: The benefits of the actual end user are just the simplifying of how they engage with companies. Not being force fed into, ’This is the way we have always done business so you need to engage with me in this fashion.”  That really is the consumers that are driving corporations do that.  And the smart corporations are jumping on it very quickly.

Small Business Trends: So if we were to look out maybe a year or two from now, what are we going to have at our disposal by way of collaboration services to assist the customer in having a greater experience?

John Hernandez: The big thing for the consumer will be a more proactive nature.  The ability for corporations to understand the consumer at the time of need and what service they require, as opposed to the consumer having to reach out. That will be the huge benefit to the consumer population.

On the corporation side of things, it is going to be all about simplifying technology use.  It is going to be around collaborative insights, to map insights to consumer needs, to drive business growth. So it will be a win-win for both.

Small Business Trends: And where can people learn more about how Cisco is playing a role into bringing all of this change in?

John Hernandez: Yes, a good place to go is a web page that is set up on Cisco customer collaboration.

This interview is part of our One on One series of conversations with some of the most thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. This interview has been edited for publication. To hear audio of the full interview, click the right arrow on the gray player below. You can also see more interviews in our interview series.

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From Small Business Trends

John Hernandez of Cisco: Driving Change

* * * * *

Small Business Trends: Why don’t you give us a little bit of your personal background.

Jeanne Hopkins: My background is pretty normal for a marketing person. I started working in the toy business for Milton Bradley company.  Then I went to Lego Systems, and then I moved into the technology space and worked for a couple of big B2B companies. I came to Hub Spot about two and a half years ago.

Small Business Trends: What is inbound marketing?

Jeanne Hopkins: The concept of inbound marketing is based on three principles. The first one is getting found on the Internet using those search terms that people are looking for when they are trying to solve a problem they have.

The middle of the funnel is what we would call conversion, or getting information from people that visit your site. When they fill out a form we consider that a conversion, or if they give you some information, “Here is my email address and I am looking forward to getting an email newsletter from you.” That is a conversion.

The third component is what we call analyze. How many people visited that particular landing page or offer page? How many people converted to a lead, and more importantly, how many people actually became a customer?

Small Business Trends: How successful are small businesses with inbound marketing?

Jeanne Hopkins: I think the biggest challenge for small business is time. But know that companies that blog, even just once a month, have 50% more visitors to their website than companies that don’t.

So that is the fundamental reason why we encourage people to create content that allows you to get found on the Internet.

Small Business Trends: What skill sets are required to be good at the middle of the funnel portion and turn those leads into sales opportunities?

Jeanne Hopkins: First of all you want to think about how you are following up on those leads. All leads are not created equal. For example, at HubSpot a demo lead is probably worth 10 or 20 times as much in terms of value to a sales person than a lead for somebody that downloaded a Facebook eBook.

What ends up happening is those Facebook eBook leads might have a high volume, but the sales person does not want to follow up on those particular leads because there is less of a likelihood of success with them.  And sales people want to be successful, right?

Mac MacIntosh, a fantastic B2B speaker, says only 23% of those people searching for solutions actually buy within six months.  But two thirds of the people looking for solutions will still buy.  That is what the whole concept of the middle of the funnel is – to keep those people warmed up. You want your brand, your company, your service to be available to them when they are ready to buy.

Small Business Trends: How do you go about implementing a good foundation for that middle part?

Jeanne Hopkins: I would put together a mind map or a spreadsheet which would have a series of offers to warm people up. For example, when you ask somebody for a demo, it is like asking somebody to get married before you ask them out for a cup of coffee. The cup of coffee is get my email newsletters, the cup of coffee is to get my Facebook eBook.  Getting married is the demo because every person who says, “I want a demo” - they know they will be called by a sales person.

Small Business Trends: What mix do you have to have in place in order to make sure you are successful with your funnel operations?

Jeanne Hopkins: I think the very first step is to talk to the sales organization to be able to get them aligned. You are not in it on your own, and they are not in it on their own. You are hooked together.

The second step is to figure out what works. How did you get to that particular demo phase? How do you get them to that point? Once you have actually mapped it out, you can realize that for every 100 visitors to the website – five actually fill out a form. Of those five that fill out a form, these three people fill out this form, and these two people fill out this form, but the two people that fill out the second form - one of them actually becomes a demo.  And of every other five demos, we get two customers.

That is the kind of data that you want.  You really want to be able to see the flow because you want to make sure that those three people that fill out the form, you see, they never become customers.  So you want to be sure that you are not doing more of that - because you are essentially wasting the sales persons time in terms of closing the deal.

Small Business Trends: Where can people find out more?

Jeanne Hopkins: You can go to HubSpot.com. We have a lot of free marketing resources. The next place I would say to visit is TheMarketingGrader.com.  It is a free tool that HubSpot offers.  We have 65 different metrics there to see how you work against other companies, how you stack up, it is pretty awesome.

This interview is part of our One on One series of conversations with some of the most thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. This interview has been edited for publication. To hear audio of the full interview, click the right arrow on the gray player below. You can also see more interviews in our interview series.

From Small Business Trends

Jeanne Hopkins of HubSpot: All Leads Are Not Created Equal

Cory Hartlen of Radian6, a site that listens, tracks and monitors social media conversations so that businesses can successfully employ a social media strategy, joins Brent Leary to discuss why it’s so important to listen.

* * * * *

Small Business Trends: Before we jump in, maybe you can tell us a little bit about yourself?

Cory Hartlen: I came into social media, into Radian6, in a really round about way. I spent 10 years in the food and beverage business and I was managing bars and restaurants.  I even waited tables and bartended.  For a little while, I started my own stand up career and toured around Canada. When I got to be closer to age 30, I decided it was time to put down some roots and began a career in financial planning.

Then in October of 200,8 after the market crashed, I wanted to find something a little bit more stable and was more than happy to go through the interview process at Radian6.  It has been the best decision I ever made.

Small Business Trends: How are companies looking at social media monitoring in 2012?

Cory Hartlen: I think the industry has really grown up in the last two or three years and it’s starting to come into its own. The people leading the industry have been doing it from the early days.  You have Dell, Pepsi and Microsoft.  They’ve been doing it very well.  And then there are the people that are now getting into it.  So we do see there is a fragmented gap.

The people that have been doing it for a while are trying to figure out ways in which they can infuse social data and social media intelligence through the organization. The others start with marketing, PR or corporate communications, and do some testing and develop some strategies to figure out ways to measure the effectiveness. As it starts to grow, we really see where social media flows though the organizations.  So it does not just live in marketing anymore.

Small Business Trends: How do you see listening impacting areas of business?

Cory Hartlen: One of the neatest stories that I’ve heard the last few months is in HR. Being able to listen for all brand mentions of people that have graduated with their MBA, or are looking forward to graduating with their MBA, and then seeing inside of those conversations what topics are coming to the top.  Especially when people are saying that they are looking for jobs or applying for jobs.

We have had a few clients who have had success in being able to find potential candidates for their junior executive training programs. Instead of being able to rely on more traditional avenues for that, where there have been recruiters or headhunters, they are able to use social listening to help reduce some of those costs.

Small Business Trends: What are some of the skills we need to hone in order to become an effective listener?

Cory Hartlen: To become a good listener is really about having a process to get that information in the hands of people that can use it and act on it. It’s not just about how to listen, but to have a good team together that can act and capitalize on these opportunities that come from that listening program.

Small Business Trends: What are some of the ways that companies are able to quantify the importance of listening today?

Cory Hartlen: We listen to social conversations so that when people reach out to their social networks and ask for advice, then maybe we can lend a hand and share a link to our review of monitoring systems. Those conversations are very measurable because we can figure out how many leads we are getting from the social space over a given time period and get those input into our system.  Then we actually see how many of those we are able to close on over a given time period to get our own ROI from a program like that.

There are other ways that the customer service team can deliver better customer service by meeting people at the point of need in these social spaces. We have heard some new numbers that have come out on increasing the rate on one touch closes. The reduction in average time per resolution and the reduction in cost per resolutions as well.

Small Business Trends: Are there certain areas that people still have not really adjusted well to in terms of leveraging listening?

Cory Hartlen: Well I think it comes down to measurement. People may be listening to the right conversations, but they might not be using that data effectively. Maybe PR and marketing are doing some listening, but are those two departments sharing that social intelligence across their departments or across the departments that can use it? I still see that information being housed inside of the individual department and I think that can be a little counterproductive because you get a duplication of efforts.

Small Business Trends: What are the top two or three things needed in order to get the most out of listening in 2012 and beyond?

Cory Hartlen: I think that it all comes down to goals and strategy. I always say that the phone is just a phone – without a plan social media is no different. People always ask about the ROI of social media. I could very easily ask you what the ROI of my telephone is.  But without a goal and a measurable strategy, I am really left in the dark. But if I decide to make three more sales this month, then I know that I need to make X number of phone calls to be able to close that number of sales.  So now I have a goal and a strategy which can be measured to prove my success. I think that social media is no different.

Small Business Trends: Cory where can people learn more about Radian6?

Cory Hartlen: Radian6.com. We are also on Twitter @Radian6, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

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From Small Business Trends

Cory Hartlen of Radian6: We Listen to Social Media

Small Business Trends: Can you tell us a little bit about Foresee?

Larry Freed: We started ForeSee back in 2001 and found out that we are not really good about timing our first data customer, which was the week after 9/11, but very early on it really helped us as a company established what was really important to our company, which was to make sure that we are providing a great value to our clients, and also to a great extent that is what our business is all about, it is about helping companies measure customer satisfaction and overall customer experience.

Small Business Trends: You recently released the “ForeSee-E Retail Satisfaction Index for the US Holiday Season.” What is the Satisfaction Index?

Larry Freed: What this Index showed and what we really looked at was the largest 40 online retailers. Then we surveyed the customer experience using ForeSee, and it is also the same technology that drives the American customer satisfaction Index.  It is an approach for measurement of customer satisfaction that has been vetted out by many people before us, and really showing it to be the number one accurate measurement of customer satisfaction.

We have been doing this study since 2005 during the holiday season, and we have seen a pretty interesting trend. The score this year was 79 on a scale of 0 to 100 looking across those 40 retailers and that is a good score. That is actually the highest score we have seen in this Index, and keeping it in perspective that customer expectations rise over time. In other words, the experience that we expect when we visit an online retailer today is a lot greater than the experience that we expected two years ago.

The fact that we have seen scores rise over time, in spite of those rising expectations, it is actually a good sign.

Satisfaction is not simple to measure.  It is very complicated to measure.  But when we think about the simple definition of satisfaction, it is really a combination about what you get and what you expect. The rising expectations, traditionally will have a downward pressure on satisfaction.  We expect more every year on the Internet. In the case here, we find that the retailers generally have done a very good job in stepping up to those rising expectations and have actually seen the score go up over time.

Small Business Trends:  I see in the report you say a one point change in revenues generated on the Web.

Larry Freed: Right. It is really to look at what impact improving satisfaction is going to have financially. It is going to have that impact, because it is going to cause existing customers to come back and buy more. It is going to cause them to recommend you to others, and it is much easier to keep your customers satisfied and keep them coming back than to have to replace them every time they are back in the purchase cycle.

Small Business Trends: You break customer satisfaction down into four elements: merchandise; functionality; content and price. Where do those four rank in terms of how you make up that customer satisfaction score?

Larry Freed: When we look at that data, we look at each individual company.  Within those four quadrants, or four categories, we want to see how they are doing in each of those areas. How are they doing in terms of merchandise?  How are they are doing in terms of price? Content has to do with the information about the product. The functionality has to do with the capabilities that they have.

So by looking at those individual elements, we get a better understanding of how companies are doing individually within those areas.  Not only to know how well they are doing, but also to understand what impact improving those areas will have on improving satisfaction and also the consumers’ behaviors.

Price is the lowest scoring element of the four. Yet what is the impact going to have on satisfaction? What we mean by that is, if we improve price, we will not understand what impact or lift it is going to have on improving satisfaction if the resulting future behaviors are likely to purchase and then to recommend and return.  While satisfaction had the lowest price it also had the lowest impact.  Which meant we were going to get a lower return on our investment from lowering the price than we would from, as an example, improving the content or functionality of merchandise.

Merchandise was looked at across the aggregate of these 40 and was actually our highest priority element. In other words, it had the highest impact if we were going to improve the merchandise. In this case, we are talking about the appeal that the merchandise has to the consumer.  The variety that the product offered and the availability of the products and what they were looking for. That is going to have the biggest impact and so we were able to not only qualify how well somebody is doing each of these areas, but understand where to allocate your resources.

Small Business Trends: Lets talk about some of the results, Amazon and Netflix.

Larry Freed: Amazon has been one of the leaders in terms of E-Commerce from very early days of their existence. We started this measurement in 2005 and this is the first year that Amazon and Netflix have not been one and two. They traded spots a couple of times, but they have always been the top two. Amazon has continued to do well; their scores have been 88%, the highest score in retailer in our study.

Netflix had a little bit of a different story. They dropped to a 79% from an 86% last year, which was an eight percent drop and they are kind of in the middle of the pack now. Not a total surprise if you have been watching the news and seeing what is going on. Netflix has had some big challenges with their customer base in changing the programs. They were talking about spinning out different companies so they can have one doing streaming and one doing the delivery of the rentals.  Customers did not like that. Netflix did not listen to the customers.  They tried to address that and apologize a bit.  But it is going to take a while for them to earn back the trust and confidence of their customer base.

Small Business Trends: Who were some of the other companies to fall on the list?

Larry Freed:  GAP was down five points to 73% to and Overstock was down four points to a 72%.  That put both companies at the bottom of our list. Now, keeping it in perspective, they are still two of the 40 largest online retailers and what the satisfaction score is telling us is that their future prospects are probably not as good as their past history has shown.  And unless they can turn that around and do a better job of satisfying their customers, they are going to have some challenges.

For each of the companies, the driving triggers of what is going to make and break their satisfaction is going to be different. These two companies are ending up with pretty poor satisfaction scores in comparison to where they were last year.

Small Business Trends: If you could offer advice to smaller retailers and online retailers, what is the lesson that they could learn and take way?

Larry Freed: Make sure that you listen to your customers and make sure that you understand the importance of satisfying them. It is not just about this one transaction, it is about the future transaction that is going to come.  If they have a great experience they are going to come back and buy more. If they have a bad experience they are going to be gone forever and your cost of acquisition will start to have a big impact on your business in a negative way.

The second thing is that while consumers were not thrilled with the prices, they also said it is not the area that is going to most incent them to buy more and be loyal.  They would rather see improvements in the merchandise and the information about the products and the functionality of the website improved.  Those are going to have a big return on investment and are going to have more of an impact on changing their behavior.  This is the first time we have seen that behavior since 2007.

The third thing is that when focusing on your customers, you have got to decide really what is going to be the key strategies for your business and make sure that those are lining up with those customer expectations. Part of your marketing and advertising needs to reinforce those expectations that you are going to deliver on. If you advertise yourself as the lowest provider and you are not, you are going to dissatisfy customers. If you advertise free shipping but there are all of these conditions you have got to meet in order to get free shipping, then you are not going to satisfy them. The key is to live up to the expectations that you are setting up with your customers.

Small Business Trends: Where can people learn more about the study and about what you guys do?

Larry Freed: They can come to our website which is www.ForeSee.com, and we would love to be able to talk to those people more and they explain how this can help them.

This interview is part of our One on One series of conversations with some of the most thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. This interview has been edited for publication. To hear audio of the full interview, click the right arrow on the gray player below. You can also see more interviews in our interview series.

From Small Business Trends

Larry Freed of ForeSee: A Hard Lesson in Satisfaction

Small Business Trends: Tell us a little bit about what TOA does.

Yuval: TOA provides a cloud-based software solution for managing mobile employees, with a view to and focus on the customer experience – managing mobile employees like technicians, service people and delivery people who go to customers’ homes on an appointment basis.

We’ve all experienced waiting for the cable guy. We have software that can predict a one-hour window for people to wait with 98 percent accuracy, so instead of waiting for all day, or four hours, you know when the guy’s going to arrive.

Small Business Trends: Recently, you sponsored a research study by the Economist Intelligence Unit on customer service challenges and trends. Ninety-five percent of respondents said offering tailored customer service is a big need for their businesses.

Yuval: People are getting used to the idea that they can tailor things to their specific needs and desires, and that’s beginning to spill out beyond the virtual world into the real world. People want the same kind of level of personalization they have in the virtual world in their physical world.

Small Business Trends: Customers are on social networks, they’re using mobile devices, and they really want to be able to use these things in as many parts of their life as possible. And it sounds like customer service is another one of those avenues, where they expect vendors, to engage them in order to serve them better.

Yuval: Well, we are all deeply connected today, right? Yesterday, I left my mobile phone in a taxi and I felt like my right arm had been cut off until the phone back. It’s that deep connection with devices and through them with the network–the social network, the information network, and in this case, the service network.

Those connections are something that we’ve grown to not just expect, but depend on and be almost addicted to. So it’s not surprising that people want to extend that level of connectivity into their service experiences.

Small Business Trends: And because of that customer-driven need 51` percent of respondents say they will introduce new customer service systems or software in the next three years.

Yuval: Some service organizations have already taken the step. For example, UPS recently said to customers, you don’t have to wait for the package anymore–you can actually go on our website and tailor the time you would like to get your package delivered to your home.

Small Business Trends: There’s a lot of great information in this survey, but is there anything that surprises you in the results?

Yuval: That not 100 percent thought it was important to engage in social media and tailor and personalize services to customers’ needs. It was in the 90s, which is very high. But our goal is to make sure that all companies think in terms of, “How do I fit my services to my customers’ needs?”

Small Business Trends: If you were to look out a year from now, where do you think companies are going to be in merging social and to keep improving the customer experience?

Yuval: I think there’s a clear convergence of all these kinds of technologies. What we have that’s unique, and what I think is going to be the next wave, is to be more predictive.

When you go on Amazon today, you buy something, and it says customers who bought this also bought that, there’s actually a predictive engine that tries to anticipate what you might want to buy. [Looking] a year forward, I think you’re talking about a much more anticipatory experience that will predict [customer needs], not just respond or give customers the ability to personalize their services.

Small Business Trends: Where can people go to learn more about the study?

Yuval: The study is going to be posted on our website, TOA Technologies, and on The Economist website.

This interview is part of our One on One series of conversations with some of the most thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. This interview has been edited for publication. To hear audio of the full interview, click the right arrow on the gray player below. You can also see more interviews in our interview series.

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From Small Business Trends

Yuval Brisker of TOA Technologies: Waiting for the Cable Guy

Small Business Trends: Can you fill us in on what Get Satisfaction does and your background?

Jeff Nolan: Get Satisfaction is a hosted platform for online customer communities. We provide a place where companies and their customers can share ideas, answer questions, resolve problems and provide positive feedback.

My personal background is quite diverse. I’ve had a variety of technical roles, marketing and some limited sales exposure but my formative experience is as a venture capitalist. I was one of the founding partners of SAP Ventures. At the end of my duration with SAP I moved into the global marketing organization, then ran NewsGator’s media and consumer application business.

Small Business Trends: Everybody is talking about online communities, but for years I’ve heard the saying, “Customer service is the new marketing.” Do you think in 2012 customer service really does become the new marketing, and where do online communities fit into that equation?

Jeff Nolan: Get Satisfaction was founded around the premise that by providing superior customer support, companies would not only achieve a sustainable competitive advantage, but would also see their business grow at a more efficient rate than if they just plowed money into marketing for the sake of marketing.

It’s no longer just about advertising or driving people to a website. There are two important things going on. One, you have to engage consumers where they are. And where they are is at the intersection of your brand and whatever social network or technology they’re using at that moment.

Two, it’s not just where you do this; it’s how you do it. Consumers are increasingly sophisticated about marketing and advertising, and they’re demanding a more human approach to how they interact with a company.

Small Business Trends: There’s the saying, “It takes a village…” and it seems like today, you could say, “It takes a community to raise a company.” How can small businesses take advantage of online communities?

Jeff Nolan: Customers exist in a context of a life cycle – acquisition, transaction, delivery, support and then advocacy. Your objective is to move your customers through each stage of that lifecycle and then repeat the process. Not just with a new customer, but also with the ones you already have.

Online communities are very important in realizing this goal because they provide an effective, repeatable technology solution for engaging your customers around questions and ideas—from the engagement they have with you before they buy to resolving inevitable issues they have when they do buy. Those interactions create advocates.

Small Business Trends: A lot of people, when they think about online communities, focus on B2C. Do you see a community strategy that will also help B2B?

Jeff Nolan: I think that B2B vs. B2C is somewhat of a red herring. It’s rooted in the old ways we used to sell stuff. There are many B2C products that exhibit the same dynamics of what we would normally consider B2B. They’re highly deliberative in nature. They have a longer sales cycle. They rely heavily on influence from third parties.

Small Business Trends: How does a small business determine the mix between having their own community and also engaging on general social networks?

Jeff Nolan: With Get Satisfaction, we’ve undertaken great efforts to bring those social networks into the fold. We’re providing your [brand] with a consistent community experience, not just on the Web, but also in Facebook, on Twitter, in your mobile applications, in different languages and so on.

One of the challenges businesses have when approaching community through several venues is ensuring the consistency and reusability of content. We see this in Facebook a lot. Companies that are trying to do customer support through the wall on Facebook face an unenviable challenge, because that is not scalable.

Small Business Trends: Talk a little about the importance of creating real-time good answers as opposed to just marketing content.

Jeff Nolan: When you have a question, you want an answer. If you are investing your time to share an idea with a company about how their product or service can be better, you care about them responding to you, rather than it going into a black hole. Get Satisfaction has a technology solution that humanizes the interaction between company and customer. [Users] get a very authentic behavior that reflects how people talk to each other.

Small Business Trends: How important is it for SMBs to have a strategy of engagement that fosters a community that helps each and creates answers that are important to individual customers.

Jeff Nolan: It’s incredibly important that companies of all sizes do this. But it’s more critical for small companies. Community, superior customer engagement, customer insight and knowing more about your customer levels the playing field.

Small Business Trends: How easy is it for a company to get started creating an online community?

Jeff Nolan: Well, it’s very easy with us because we are a freemium business–we have a free product that is fully functioning. From that you can upgrade into various plan levels that have increasing feature sets, capabilities or customization opportunities.

Small Business Trends: Where can people learn more about Gets Satisfaction?

Jeff Nolan: Go to our website at GetSatisfaction.com, and you can also find us on Twitter, Facebook and all the popular social channels.

This interview is part of our One on One series of conversations with some of the most thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. This interview has been edited for publication. To hear audio of the full interview, click the right arrow on the gray player below. You can also see more interviews in our interview series.

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From Small Business Trends

Jeff Nolan of Get Satisfaction: Level the Playing Field With a Customer Community

In this interview, Brent Leary spoke with Jeff Haynie, whose platform and services company enables Web developers to build applications for mobile, tablet and desktop platforms, to learn how smart entrepreneurs are tapping into the power of mobile apps to transform their businesses.

* * * * *

Small Business Trends: Tell us a little bit about Appcelerator.

Jeff Haynie: This is my third venture-backed startup. We are focused on mobile app platforms and helping companies build mobile and tablet solutions.

Small Business Trends: Speaking of mobility from a different perspective, you moved from Atlanta to Silicon Valley to start Appcelerator. Why did you have to make the move? There are a lot of folks starting technology businesses outside of Silicon Valley.

Jeff Haynie: You can start a business pretty much anywhere today. For me, having raised money before, building a great company is about people and relationships. As much as social networks help us amplify relationships, it’s no replacement from sitting across from somebody and having a heart-to-heart discussion.

I felt the best place for our business was being in the heart of where disruption and innovation and capital happen. A wise investor told me a while back, if you want to be an actor, you go to Hollywood. If you want to be a stockbroker, you go to New York. If you want to be a technology entrepreneur, you come to Silicon Valley.

Small Business Trends: Do you think you could have created Appcelerator in Atlanta, or would it just take a lot longer?

Jeff Haynie: I don’t think every business needs to follow these rules, but for our company, I don’t think we would have been able to do [in Atlanta] what we have done [in Silicon Valley]. Often in new companies, it’s about getting great people that are experienced and understand how to build high-gross companies. Those people aren’t just employees, they are partners, investors and the whole ecosystem that it takes to build a successful, fast-growing company.

Small Business Trends: What are some of the main trends businesses should be aware of in creating mobile applications to engage with their customers?

Jeff Haynie: It’s increasingly about getting in front of alternate screen devices–smartphones, tablets, smart televisions. We are going to see a lot more of that with surface computing and telematic and wall-based computing. People are calling this the post-PC era.

The PC’s not dead, but we are seeing that more and more capabilities and opportunities exist with the devices in your pocket that are always available and always on. And the ability to build mobile applications that enable companies and their employees is low-cost and available today.

That is the big opportunity businesses have to expand both their business, especially if they are a SaaS or a software company, and their productivity.

Small Business Trends: Are you surprised at the speed of acceptance of tablet devices?

Jeff Haynie: On one hand, yes, if you look at how fast the iPad resonated. They are now selling in revenue terms more in iPads than in their existing desktop and laptop line. That’s in less than 18 months of a product’s introduction into the market.

But on the other hand, no, in the sense that we in the technology community have always imagined these devices. We have always talked about ebooks and tablets and slates. The costs have dramatically come down, and combined with high-speed data networks and the widespread use of public Wi-Fi, that is a perfect storm for these devices to dramatically change the way we work, the way we consume content and the way we interact with business and consumer-based systems.

Small Business Trends: What about the adoption of app marketplaces?

Jeff Haynie: Again, there’s a perfect storm from external factors. Apple has helped the world understand how to buy things digitally. Apps have been somewhat removed from the traditional process of [software] distribution and maintenance, which has really helped oil the machine.

When you see the richness of what you can do with apps, it doesn’t mean Web content is going to get killed. It just means a lot of new opportunities for businesses.

Small Business Trends: What does the Amazon Android Marketplace mean for the way we embrace applications on mobile devices?

Jeff Haynie: It’s a great opportunity for everybody. Amazon has a phenomenal consumer transaction engine, combined with Web services infrastructures, which is a bigger and bigger part of their core business. That is going to propel the adoption of applications, and it provides a great community from a distribution and marketing standpoint.

In the early days, the Internet was great because anybody could produce a web page. It was problematic because it was impossible to find all of the websites in the world, until Google came along and created a business model to make money through driving search.

That’s what is happening in the marketplace right now. It’s still a little messy, but I think mobility [is going to create new] business models.

Small Business Trends: For companies that are just starting to think about creating mobile apps aimed at engaging customers, what are some things they should be aware of?

Jeff Haynie: We recommend companies start with strategy and understanding the mobile way. Mobility is not just taking your website or content and miniaturizing it. You have to ask, How does mobility impact my business and what can I do to take advantage of that?

Think about the insurance industry. All the insurance companies are making reporting accidents using mobile devices much better. The impact is driving costs down from a call center standpoint and faster turnaround in capturing all of the necessary data. That transforms the business, creates a much better relationship with the customer and ultimately creates efficiency and top-line capabilities you don’t have with a call center or with the traditional process.

[They] are not just thinking about, OK, I just look up where my closest agent is or how to find the website of my insurance provider. Businesses small and large need to look at mobility as a tool for transforming their business.

Small Business Trends: Where can people learn more about what you are up?

Jeff Haynie: Our website, Appcelerator.com.

This interview is part of our One on One series of conversations with some of the most thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. This interview has been edited for publication. To hear audio of the full interview, click the right arrow on the gray player below. You can also see more interviews in our interview series.

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From Small Business Trends

Jeff Haynie of Appcelerator: It’s About People and Relationships

In this interview, Phil spoke with Brent Leary about how the sweet music of marketing automation can simplify the process for even the smallest businesses.

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Small Business Trends: Can you tell us about your background and Marketo?

Phil Fernandez: For the last 20 years I have been working on the intersection of technology and marketing. I have seen the need for technology to support modern marketing and the great opportunities to develop products for companies large and small. We started Marketo about four and half years ago with that goal and it’s been a wonderful success story.

Small Business Trends: You started out focusing on marketing automation. Has marketing automation been the focus of a lot of small businesses you have come in contact with? Should it be?

Phil Fernandez: My co-founders and I had been working on marketing for big businesses and the idea of Marketo was that small businesses were being left aside as technologies developed on the higher end. We wanted to take advantage of how accessible technologies are now, [thanks] to the on-demand, Web app model, and build a product for small businesses.

Small Business Trends: What are some of the biggest impact areas marketing automation has on a small business today?

Phil Fernandez: All buying today starts on the Web and on social media. The first thing people do if they are going to buy something is go online, ask their friends on Facebook and read websites. All of those prospective buyers are hanging out in these forums.

[For] a small business, how do you find and engage with those buyers? You have to be found by them, which means you have to excel at search engine optimization. Part of the trouble is you have to pay to do those things–you have to pay to advertise on Google. So you need to make sure that every time you pay to find buyers, you convert them into people who actually do business with you. That is where marketing automation comes in.

For example, if you are spending $500 on Google Ads, you need to be sure you convert that click into revenue. Spark by Marketo, our product, helps our customers turn that click into a lead, then into revenue.

Small Business Trends: There are so many different channels of communication between a company and a prospect. How does automation help organize communication and make sense of it?

Phil Fernandez: Customers are inherently multichannel creatures. They go on the Web; they do email; they go to trade shows; they get phone calls. All of that needs to make sense to the customer or it becomes incoherent noise. I like to think of marketing automation as the orchestra conductor.

If somebody comes to your website, how do you follow up with email or a phone call later that shows that customer you know them better because you talked to them on the Web before? We provide that cross-channel communication and coordination, as well as the analytics that help you get to know that customer better.

Small Business Trends: How does automation help marketing connect with sales at the right point with the right person with the right offer?

Phil Fernandez: Marketing tends to meet the prospective buyer first. By understanding which prospective buyers are most active and engaged, they can bubble to the top the people who are most likely to be good candidates for sales. Then if Marketing can hand those names off to their sales team, salespeople can be far more effective.

Small Business Trends: Let’s get down to ROI. How can you measure the impact?

Phil Fernandez: ROI can be really simple. For example, one of our customers is a company called ShipServ that does about $800 a month worth of Google Marketing. They buy AdWords, their prospect customers click on their ads and come to a landing page. If that page is relevant and engaging, it’s much more likely that that prospective buyer will [provide the information] to enable further contact.

We make it really easy so if somebody clicks through on one of your ads, you can send them another message a day later that reinforces that interaction that happened the day before, which can make Google Advertising four times more cost effective for a small business. That can pay for our entire system right there.

Then if you continue to build more relationships and extend to other channels, you keep building upon that initial effect. We have customers that get 20 times more leads and have grown by as much as 40 percent.

Small Business Trends: How does marketing automation help extend the relationships you have with current customers?

Phil Fernandez: Marketing automation is really customer interaction automation. That old saying, “It’s cheaper to keep a customer than to acquire a customer,” is true, and it means you need to keep your customers stay happy. Stay in communication with them and know how to seize the moment when you can present that customer with an offer, an upsell or a cross sell.

We encourage our customers not to think about using Spark by Marketo as just a customer acquisition tool, but as a way to cost effectively stay in touch with their customer base over time and build deep customer relationships.

Small Business Trends: A year or two years from now, how will small businesses be using marketing automation to engage customers?

Phil Fernandez: These tools have historically been the province of the world’s largest companies. But with products like Spark by Marketo, all those powerful tools are simple and cost effective for small businesses because they can be bought and used on the Web without buying software or making a long-term commitment. In one or two years I think hundreds of small businesses will be using very sophisticated marketing automation technologies to grow.

Small Business Trends: Where can people learn more about Spark and Marketo?

Phil Fernandez: You can find out about Spark, our product for small business, at SparkByMarketo.com.

This interview is part of our One on One series of conversations with some of the most thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. This interview has been edited for publication. To listen to the full audio of the interview, click the right arrow on the gray player below. You can also see more interviews in our interview series.

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From Small Business Trends

Phil Fernandez of Marketo: Conducting The Orchestra

In this interview, Anup Murarka, Director of Product Marketing for Flash at Adobe, spoke with Brent Leary about how small business owners need to think outside the box to engage customers with an exciting personal experience – the warm and fuzzy kind.

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Small Business Trends: Tell us a little bit about your background.

Anup Murarka: My background is in mobile software, video games and consumer technologies. At Adobe, I focus on how we make the process of creating mobile applications for content easier. The technology has moved so far from where we were just a few years ago that there is not only an exciting opportunity for companies to reach out to new audiences, but also a lot of choices of what to use to build the mobile experience.

Small Business Trends: I think this is the first year that combined sales of laptops and desktops are going to be surpassed by mobile devices. How has that changed the game in terms of user experience and what users expect?

Anup Murarka: This explosion of screens has meant that consumers expect access to content and services wherever they are, and have much higher expectations for the quality of that experience.

Small Business Trends: You said opportunities for engagement have exploded because of mobile devices. Do you think small businesses are taking advantage of that opportunity?

Anup Murarka: Small businesses have a tremendous number of challenges just growing their current business, so mobile is often underutilized. Mobile devices–phones and tablets–tend to be tied to an individual, unlike household computers that are often shared. With [mobile], you have an opportunity as a small business owner to reach an individual on a one-on-one basis anywhere in the world. That’s a powerful tool.

Small Business Trends: How important is it for a company to have a good mobile experience for customers? A lot of small businesses still think of the Web as being their central point, but it seems the best way to get people’s attention is through a mobile device.

Anup Murarka: If you have not thought about mobile, your competitors will. You have an opportunity to interact with that customer far more regularly if you have a mobile experience. For the last 12 to 18 months we have been recommending that a lot of our customers start with mobile designs first. If you start with a mobile design, it’s pretty easy to take that design, concept or application and move it to the desktop.

Small Business Trends: That is a totally different way for a lot of small businesses to think. What are some things they should be aware of as they begin down this road?

Anup Murarka: You cannot think of it as “create a piece of content, and you’re done” or “create an application, and you’re done.” The problems haven’t changed from the traditional problems when you try to attract customers in the physical realm.

You have to think about how you marketing yourself. How do you ensure that the experience is high enough quality that consumers come back to it? How do you keep it fresh and tied to what you are doing day-to-day in your business?

Have you thought through, not just the cost of building it, but also the cost of maintaining it, the cost of keeping it fresh, the cost of keeping it in front of customers and getting feedback from customers? If you can plan in a complete fashion, you are going to be far happier with your mobile app.

Small Business Trends: One of the decisions businesses have to make is whether to create a mobile Web app that runs in the browser or a native app. How do you choose?

Anup Murarka: It’s a choice between trying to reach people with a less deep or less interactive experience versus a standalone application that can be purchased and offers a deeper level of engagement. The mobile website is often an extension of your desktop website. You are trying to provide continuity and [similar] information so that a consumer who is used to going to your desktop website has a comfort level.

But when you want that customer to really engage and interact, you are likely to want an application experience. So you’re using the mobile website as a hook, but using an application to get them engaged on an ongoing basis [because it] is always available, even when they are offline.

Small Business Trends: We also have different platforms–Apple iOS, Android; we have phones and tablets. What are some things to be aware of regarding different footprints and platforms?

Anup Murarka: This is a big design and technology challenge, but it is something you can take practical steps to address. You want a sense of what types of devices [your] customers have, versus trying to think you are going to solve all of them by getting everywhere right away. Particularly as a small business, you have to make choices.

The experiences can be very different because of the form factors to these devices. What you do on a phone is different than what you do on a tablet, what you do on a desktop, what you do on a television. This explosion in screens means you want to be looking for technologies that help you get that reach, so you do not have to reinvent and reinvest in every instance.

We don’t think that scales very well. Trying to do an app for 20 different devices is expensive, frustrating and challenging to manage. Instead, look for technologies–whether Flash or HTML–that can deliver consistently across a wider range of platforms.

Small Business Trends: Flash is really prevalent on the Web. Where does Flash fit in when it comes to mobile application development?

Anup Murarka: Even with our long history of Flash and even mobile development, we have really entered into a new area over the last year and a half. Flash is available in over 140 million devices, smartphones and tablets around the world. If you use Flash to build an application, not just within a website, you can reach not only all of those Android devices, BlackBerry Playbooks and other platforms, but also iOS. You can deliver a Flash-based application to well over 200 million devices worldwide.

Small Business Trends: We have heard a lot about HTML5 recently. Where do you see HTML5 and Flash working in mobile?

Anup Murarka: Flash and HTML have lived side by side for many years. As HTML standards evolve, Flash will continue to be at the forefront of creating the most rich and unique experiences on the Web.

Going forward we think Flash is going to be differentiated in three ways. One is for the sort of media-rich, heavy video applications with lots of interactivity, just as [Flash] is popular for video today on the desktop Web.

A second category we are really excited about is games. Flash is powering nine if not 10 of the top 10 Facebook games. Social games has been a tremendous category, and we have an opportunity to make those games available on a mobile device–without forcing the game publisher to re-author their content.  We have a set of new features we will be announcing in the next year specifically for game publishers.

The third is what we call data-driven applications — applications that need visualization such as dashboards, charts and graphs. Customer experience and customer relationship management [is] the type of application where Flash could really differentiate itself.

Small Business Trends: How do you measure the impact of mobile content?

Anup Murarka: So many times we see companies put something out there without understanding how it is used or if it is used. That means more than just Web traffic or visits to a page or downloads of an app. It means understanding where consumers are spending time with that content. Are they spending a few minutes looking at it and then going off to something else? If it is an application, are there certain aspects that they come back to on a daily basis, and others they tried once and never went back to?

We have been building a lot of this capability into a product we have for digital marketers from Omniture. It allows our customers to not just look at what a single Web page does, but also at how individual elements within a page are doing, and to try out different content in an application.

Small Business Trends: How soon do you think [mobile] is going to go from “nice to have” to “must have”?

Anup Murarka: If it’s not already a must-have for a business, it is going to be a must-have within the next five years. [A company] may decide for whatever reason that they can’t make the investment in mobile right away, but they at least have to make that conscious decision.

Small Business Trends: Where can people learn more about what Adobe is doing in this area?

Anup Murarka: The Adobe.com website is a great starting point and has a number of resources, including resources to connect small businesses to our agency partners.

This interview is part of our One on One series of conversations with some of the most thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. This interview has been edited for publication. To hear audio of the full interview, click the right arrow on the gray player below. You can also see more interviews in our interview series.

[To listen to audio, click this icon]

From Small Business Trends

Anup Murarka of Adobe: People Are Tied To Mobile Devices

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Small Business Trends: Could you give us a little bit of your background?

Rajen Sheth: I’ve been at Google about seven years, focused on our Enterprise products. I helped start the Google Apps product line and have now taken on Chrome and Chrome Apps for businesses. Through all of this my goal has been, How do we improve the experience of businesses? How do we make it simpler for them to use computing?

Small Business Trends: Let’s talk about what you are doing with the Google Chromebook. Some people don’t know exactly how it compares to a traditional laptop or a tablet.

Rajen Sheth: The difference is along three dimensions: speed, simplicity and security.  First, speed: Your traditional laptop takes several minutes to load, and programs might go slow at times. The Chromebook is very fast. It loads in less than seven seconds. It is one of the fastest browsing experiences you’ll have.

Second, simplicity: It is also a lot simpler. We have tried to design it so that it is simple for the average user to get in, get out and do their work as simply as possible.

Last, security: It’s a much more secure experience. Built-in security technologies make the Chromebook safer from viruses and malware than anything else out there. Also, your data is actually not stored on the device, so if you were to lose your laptop, none of the data goes with it. That’s been a huge problem for corporations – people having [sensitive data] on a laptop that gets lost.

Small Business Trends: Do you need to be connected to the Internet in order to use the Chromebook?

Rajen Sheth: You can use it connected or disconnected, depending on the application you are using. Many applications are now available offline within the browser. We are planning to launch offline access to Google Apps for Gmail Calendar and Google Docs later this summer.

However, we have oriented this device to make sure you can be connected most of the time. For example, it connects using ethernet and Wi-Fi, but also has a built in 3G card. There is a special plan in the U.S. with Verizon where you can get a certain amount of 3G coverage for free out of the box, then purchase pay-as-you-go type plans for more coverage.

Small Business Trends: How does the Chromebook compare to the latest tablet devices?

Rajen Sheth: We’ve really focused on the laptop and the desktop. We believe the tablet form factor has a lot of promise, but still people do most of their work on a laptop or a desktop, so we oriented the Chromebook towards that experience. We tried to make it something that could replace your traditional laptop and make it a lot simpler to do your work.

Small Business Trends: There are great applications under the Google Apps umbrella. Do these come on the Chromebook? How do you use Google Apps with the Chromebook?

Rajen Sheth: It is optimized to work, not only with Google Apps, but with a variety of Web-based applications. You can load Google Apps in the browser, just like anything else you use apps for. In the Web Store, we have a variety of other applications that you can one-click install. In fact, this is probably the first new operating system where you don’t need new applications. You can use this with browser-based applications behind your firewall, or with virtualized desktops and things like Citrix and VMWare.

Small Business Trends: Where can somebody get their hands on a Chromebook?

Rajen Sheth: We have two manufacturers so far: Samsung, which has the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook, and Acer, which has the Asus700 Chromebook. These are available on Amazon for consumers and through Google for businesses.

For businesses, we have a unique deal where, rather than paying upfront for a laptop, you pay $28 per month for the laptop, the services and support around it, the ability to manage the laptop and a replacement program. It makes it easier for businesses to manage their computing. Go to Google.com/chromebook to find out more.

Small Business Trends: Do you get automatic updates to the Chrome OS?

Rajen Sheth: That’s one thing we spent a lot of time trying to optimize. Chrome upgrades seamlessly in the background, and the next time you restart your Chromebook, you have the new version.

Small Business Trends: If you could peer out a year or two from now, what can we expect to do with a Google Chromebook?

Rajen Sheth: One big trend is that more and more business applications are moving to the browser–everything from Google Apps to SalesForce.com to WorkDay to ZoHo. A couple years out, people will be able to do everything in the browser that they need to do for a business, and the [experience] will be as rich as anything you can do on a desktop. People will naturally move to a browser-based world.

From Small Business Trends

One on One: Rajen Sheth of Google Chrome