Do, or Do Not, There is No Try

Yoda always had a way with words.

It seems my activities in the last year or so on this blog have been slacking, a sure sign I was busier at work and home. Twitter was down too, I know hard for you to believe. But for those keeping score, my Klout score is still hanging around 62-64, so maybe I was more active than I thought.

And yet I did get to do all of this:

• guest blogged over here a bit
• live tweeted, not one, not 2 but 3 Palm Beach Operas (La Cerentola, La Traviata and Salome) and doing it again for Macbeth right before heading to Orlando
• was rewarded with another year as an IBM Champion
• home schooled my kids (and still do) and it's been great
• spoke at SugarCon for the 2nd time in a row
• got to listen to and spend 1 on 1 time with the great Paul Greenberg
• attended and spoke a few times at my first ever IBM Impact 
• shot a few videos for/with IBM and fellow Champions
• spoke at MWLUG and had a great time with everyone in Indianapolis
• finally went on a trip with just my wife and no kids for the first time since the oldest was born, we went back to Israel for the first time since 2001
• paused my other blog

But I did not write any articles this year that were published, first time in a while. No books written either, although I have some in mind, both technical and fun. I will at least look into having these books published and if there is interest will start writing them.

I want to write more articles this year, well even 1 would be more than last year, so will work on this as well.

The muse just wasn't very active and I apologize, but as it appears, I have been blogging for 7 years so maybe this was a little sabbatical and now I will ramp back up.

Of course, Lotusphere Connect 2014 is coming up and I will post more on this in time.

See you in Orlando I hope and since my session is on Sunday at 10:30am no reason not to pop in, that is unless you are on the hog ride that morning.

Google Hangout CRM Discussion Recording

The IBM Midmarket Hangout I did recently around SugarCRM, and CRM in general, highlighted not just details from SugarCRM and Sugarcon, but also customer adoption and marketing automation discussions.

The Google+ Hangout was recorded and here it is.

Edit December 2016. It looks like the video was removed at some point, I have a copy and will be posting it back up soon.

Analytics and Crickets

While hanging out at #Sugarcon this week with good friend Stuart Mcintyre we were struck by what we saw as a lack of socialness (made that word up) from the attendees. Granted this is in contrast to the obscenely over the top socialness of my fellow IBM friends which can be zealous in their path to be social.

SugarCRM itself is fairly active as are Larry Augustin CEO and Clint Oram CTO on Twitter. Keeping in mind we can only really see the tweets or posts if #sugarcon was in the tag or discussion. So where is everyone?

In this graphic on the left, courtesy of NextPrinciples, which by the way you can click on and move any of the links and connections, a very nice benefit, you can see who had tweets retweeted or was the primary creator of the original tweets. You can see about 30+ accounts were pretty active although over 700 tweeted something, see Engagement below. If I presume about 1,200 people attended then about 2-3% are active socially. And since I know many of the names, they are business partners. Begging the question, where is the audience? Where are the customers? The lines to the small balls in the graphic are more customers but still the audience was not heavily active. Even at the voting for the AppTakeDown winner it was about 25% that voted. See graphic on the right.

How do we engage people better? Are we happy with this little or this much engagement? 

Let's look at this information, again from NextPriniciples. Keep in mind these are just for the few days of the show and do not imply anything other than what went on at the show. In some cases SugarCRM people themselves or their accounts were excluded in these graphics.

Sugar7 is announced, but no you tube videos for it? Lost opportunity. Customers like videos, social media people love graphics. perhaps they were posted, but just not included in the analytics.

 

This is hopefully untrue, but only 10 blog posts? I wrote 2 and Stuart 1, but surely there were more. maybe my friends at NextPrinciples can help with this.  A lack of primary bloggers may be hurting. then again, if we look at a week long view, will we see better details? 

The last graphic is probably not as helpful because I do not believe @sugarcon is an account on twitter so it is not surprising that there was no growth in followers.

Large numbers of followers, attendees that are social, bloggers and more all help to provide proper analytics but I was surprised at the details for the conference. If you can't get people excited enough at your annual show, I wonder what the analytics look like during the year.

Now look at  this graphic that shows the top 20 7 Hashtags:

IBM was a Diamond sponsor, no doubt this helped raise the Hashtag, but also many people expressed there impression that IBM was not the older IBM. Nice to see IBM getting that traction and awareness.

We were probably too small to get #sugarcon to trend on Twitter, but then I don't think the keynotes were livestreamed for those that could not attend which could have helped grow more awareness. 

I'd like to see more reach out to the world by SugarCRM. Their product is great, they have a great executive team, they are priced appropriately. How will they reach the goals that Larry Augustin mentioned at the opening keynote? Without leveraging their social customers they are missing a great opportunity to enhance the brand and value of the product.

Sugarcon Day 2

The second day of #sugarcon opened up with Terry Jones (slides are at the link under downloads) of Kayak, Travelocity fame reminding us all that just because we mean well, doesn't always mean we get it right. Sending out emails with wrong subjects, sending an email that has no one to reply to and more derivatives of marketing aloofness.

The afternoon sessions, 7 at a time in parallel, spanned many topics and from discussions many felt the 2nd day sessions were what they came for as they felt the 1st day were more sales pitches from vendors or marketing. Personally I was very happy in the discussion on Hillel houses using SugarCRM and the preview of Sugar7 (#Sugar7). The latter session really should have been in the ball room given how stuffed in the room, doorway and hall it was for people.

Back to the 2nd day. My demonstrations at the IBM booth went well of the VoiceRite integration with SugarCRM and IBM Connections. There were numerous exhibitors and they could be found across 3 different rooms. In a separate post I will cover some of the vendors.

My session in the afternoon was up against some strong competition but the feedback from the attendees was well worth it and I am happy to hear I hit on a key issue for many of them.

The afternoon had the Application Throwdown looking for some new and better toys for us to use found Callinize was very impressive but ProcessMaker won the event.

At the end of the event, it was announced that Stuart Mcintyre had won an iPad Mini for his tweeting efforts. Not very shocking to those that know him. For the record, I came in 4th. But analytics is another story. You can see some excellent analytics, for a few days, over here from the NextPrinciples team. If you do CRm, marketing, social media you should look at their analytics. You could be doing the same, ask me how.

Congratulations to all the winners of the various giveaways and the Faye Business group for the Patron.

Next year Sugarcon moves back to San Francisco April 27-May1, 2014 hope to get invited back to do a 3rd edition of The Boss is Anti-Social. Thank you to SugarCRM for another great show and IBM for letting me present at their booth.

Business Anti-Social: The Sugarcon 2013 Edition

For those interested in my Sugarcon 2013 slides, subtitled, Business Anti-Social: The Boss Needs SugarCRM, Give it To Them! It is on SlideShare at this location:

Business Anti-Social: The Boss Needs SugarCRM, Give it To Them! Presented by Keith Brooks

Thank you everyone who came, shared their ideas and comments or questions. 

Don't forget the Spottify list of CEO Billboard Hits!

SugarCon 2013 Day 1 - Synopsis

Sugarcon 2013 opens with some strong riffs. Guitar riffs that is, care of the SugarCRM band, playing in the same ballroom as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame plays their introduction ceremonies here at the Waldorf Astoria in New York.

Unfortunately one can not go to the basement, they have 3, where the Presidential train and "secret" railway station lies. Read more here.

Larry, Clint, Lila rock the house with Sugar7 details around social and collaboration efforts, mobile client improvements, inline editing and more.  The theme for this year is:

Every Customer, Every User, Every Time

The belief is there is an under served population of workers who should be using CRM and SugarCRM wants to grab that market. This led to a keynote that was one of the best I have heard in recent months.

Paul Greenberg, His book, CRM at the Speed of Light: Social CRM Strategy, Tools, and Techniques for Engaging Your Customers, is in its fourth edition and been called “the bible of the CRM industry”, gave an excellent keynote which left many of us in the audience wishing he could continue through lunch and afterwards. When I caught up with him at the evening event he said he would have spent lunch with us if we asked. One opportunity lost, but I had a great discussion with him and look forward to getting the slides from his session.

Paul reminded us that it is just as much about what customers want from us, as what we want from them. I could spend paragraphs on his session.

Back to SugarCon. IBM is a Diamond sponsor and has a mini theater at their stand where I have been doing a mini session on how VoiceRite integrates SugarCRM and IBM Connections.

The vendors here are very into social, marketing automation and analytics. It is all about CRM after all. For the estimated, by me, 1,200 attendees, there should be enough for everyone to find something they are missing.

Sessions in the afternoon, an average of 5 sessions running at the same time, were all well attended and provided best practices, experiences, coding examples and beyond.

The evening event was held on a rooftop bar in NYC and luckily it was a beautiful night, no clouds and reasonable temperatures prevailed. We had an excellent view of the Empire State Building and the skyline from north to south.

Looking forward to today's sessions and my own session at 3:40 in the Morgan room.

SugarCon is Coming to NY and I am Speaking Again

Hard to believe it has been a year since Sugarcon 2012 but here we are and this time we are going to be in Manhattan. Yes, New York City at the Waldorf Astoria.

You can find more information about the event, including the agenda, here.

IBM are the big Diamond sponsors, which means I did not have to do my pitch on IBM integration with SugarCRM like I did last year.

I will be speaking on Wen. the 10th at 3:40-4:15pm slot under Customer Engagement Strategy.

This year's session is an update from last year's successful session,
Business Anti-Social: Why the Boss Doesn't Get It

This year is:

Business Anti-Social: The Boss Needs SugarCRM, Give it To Them!

After the huge success you had following last year's session, your executive now uses SugarCRM right? Probably not all of you won that battle, ready for this year's? You need to be doing more, faster. Did you get messages out before and after the storms hit? What does this have to do with CRM? Everything! You need to help your CEO look good to the outside world, not just help the sales teams with business development. What other ways can you help your company look better to the outside world? Come listen as we revisit the mind of the executive and provide a few options to keep them even happier with your efforts. Leave the session with a new song list and a better understanding of how to help your executives, and yourselves, but most importantly your customers.

See you in New York. If you are coming, let me know, and if you are in town and want to meet up let me know as well.