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Don’t drink and drive farm machinery
Easy ways to make your office more green
Everyone is trying to go green. Here a few easy ways your business more green.
1. Minimize the number of individual printers on employees desks. It is amazing how much less people print when they need to walk further. ;)
2. Convert to digital paystubs, if you haven’t already. I imagine many employees review, scan, shred. This cuts out lots of steps for your employees and you HR team. And Adobe Acrobat or similar PDF creation tool is cheaper than the time you spend on postage/stuffing envelopes.
3. Get you employees mugs and water bottles. You probably have company swag. And these 2 are popular ones. Give on to each employee and lead by example: use it for you water cooler, tea and coffee. Sure you have to wash a few more dishes, but you’ll have less trash.
4. Ditch the bottled water for a cooler of better yet filtered tap. Either way you’ll use less plastic and decrease transport costs.
I thinks these are a few easy and low cost ways. Chime in if you have ideas.
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#Palmpre: Crackberry for the rest of us?
Raise your hand if you know a blackberry user. Keep them raised if the use it for personal stuff.
Keep them raised if the personal > work.
I’m sure if we were in a room of 100 people the number of hands left in the air would be less than 20.
Blackberries are the consumate work phone. To get your mail your company needs a special server. Cell phone carriers tack on the $30/month Blackberry surcharge, which frankly, even for the biggest Facebook addicts, isn’t worth it unless someone else foots the bill,
In contrast the iphone is the consumate “play” phone. Games, music, and movies are a breeze. Work? Steadily improving.
If you recall, when Palm launched the Centro, it was called the “life” phone for work and home. But it lacked the work streed cred of the Blackberry and the cool factor of the iphone. It sold a lot, but didn’t convert many existing smartphone users.
The Pre aims to change this by getting some work friendly features, and some play friendly ones. Let’s call it the crackberry for people looking for balance.
With that goal, Palm could be on to something. And the idea behind Synergy and WebOS support this notion.
Here’s to balance for work and play.
(BTW I wrote this on my Pre)
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Blogging with #palmpre
One of the things I’d like to do with my phone is fire off quick blog posts when I’m out or I have a brainstorm. The Pre looks like it can help with this.
This wasn’t really possible from my Centro and was way too much work with a virtual ipod touch keyboard. Ok well maybe it was on the Centro, but I’d didn’t spend much time on apps other than transit schedules, text to twitter, light web browsing and light email.
Anyway I have been using posterous [www.posterous.com] a little over the past few months as a psuedo personal blog. I like the email to post everywhere: twitter, facebook, friendfeed, blog. Great for pic updates to twitter from basically any phone.
So now I am giving posterous my endorsement for blogging from you Pre. Your Pre is an email machine. In fact I just found this. And posterous is the blog for emailers.
So start blogging and post everything everywhere you are online.
If you are looking for me:
http://jameane.wordpress.com
http://jameane.posterous.com
P.S second posterous from my Pre, first press from the Pre.
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Even though I didn’t win the contest…
So I have been pretty excited about the Palm Pre since CES.
1. It has a keyboard
2. It is on Sprint, my carrier
3. Synergy sounded awesome
4. Multitasking or Synergy. A toss up.
So after sitting on the wait list for 2 weeks, I finally got one. Look for tweets and posts as I get adjusted. Changing from a Palm Centro and an iPod touch too a Pre.
So far: notifications are awesome. Quite possibly my favorite feature. Email, twitter and web are great! Multitasking and card are also pretty killer.
Not so great: the USB slot cover, the difficult to use cursor for preciseness. Here is where a stylus would come in handy.
Haven’t tried: cut and paste.
Filed under: at work | Tagged: cell phones, iPhone, mobile, palm pre, sprint, technology, twitter, webos | Leave a Comment »
Transitioning. Hence the absence.
Transitions.
Lots of new stuff going on.
Some of you know…I started a new job. In a completely new role. You know I am interested in marketing automation (hence the page) and marketing 2.0/sales 2.0.I have moved from my role as a marketing person to a consultant helping implement marketing tools and CRM. So you just might see a few more techie posts and some more info on best practices and how to choose wisely. Stay tuned. As things get a bit more settled, I’ll be posting on more on software, vendors and more.
The new company: Echo Lane, SaaS consultants.
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Organization design: functional or phase based departments?
So I was pondering the other day about how organizations are sectioned off. Most organizations are grouped by department: sales, marketing, finance, engineering, and operations. This is convenient for the organizations, less so for the customer. As social media emerges as a primary vehicle for communications: for marketing, sales and customer service, organizations are struggling to build a communications group, for all stages of the customer lifecycle.
Some companies assign a team to a customer. So they’ll interface with one account manager, one service person and so on throughout their relationship with the organization. This is a great customer friendly model, but for smaller organizations, it is pretty impossible to implement while you have limited resources.
For most organizations, the primary goal is to find customers, engage them and keep them as long as possible. Why aren’t our organizations structured around these phases of the customer relationship? What if instead we organized our business around stages in the customer lifecycle. Some roles would have more representation in one stage or another, but the metrics for the organization would be based on performance in the stage?
Here’s a basic lifecycle:

lifecycle
Identification: finding new prospects, potential customers. Nurturing them until they are ready to progress the relationship with a purchasing cycle. In this “department” staff would be weighted around communicators. In a tech company this would include conventional marketing and communications people. Perhaps pre-sales technical resources. A market researcher. And a lead qualification team. The market researcher would pass feedback to the product development team on what prospective customers are looking for. This team would be graded on the number of prospects they find, and perhaps brand awareness. This team would be focused on though leadership and making the brand feel “warm and fuzzy.” A key metric would be related to conversion rates between this stage to Acquisition. They’d also focus on understanding the market and the target customer. Read more »
Filed under: at work, b2b marketing, customer acquisition, customer retention, customer service, opinions | Tagged: business management, customer lifecycle, leadership, organization structure, organizational design | Leave a Comment »

