The dilemma for professionals: How do you respond to anonymous leaks and slander?

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Today’s Australian Financial Review has an interesting article titled “Watch out for the spook in the navy blue suit” which looks at how professionals can respond to anonymous slander, quoting me and a few others.

It looks at FirmSpy, which is a site that provides gossip about Australian professional firms, notably law firms and the local arms of the Big 4 accounting firms. FirmSpy provides insights into internal issues such as bullying, sexual harassment, and staff satisfaction and turnover, resulting in Australian Financial Review calling it “Australia’s own Wikileaks for lawyers and accountants”.

For those accused of wrongdoing, there are limited possibilities for response. The article says:
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Integrating social media into cross-channel customer relationships

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Una giornata di pioggia e di sole
A week ago I was in Sanya, China, where I gave the guest keynote at the NICE Interactions 2011 conference.

NICE Systems’ history is in providing voice recording and analytics to companies with many customer interactions, such as banks and telcos, for customer services and security. From there it has morphed into providing a series of broad-based platforms to improve customer interactions across channels.

In the world of Customer Relationship Management, an increasingly important and now dominant issue is effectively managing relationships across channels. The critical ‘single customer view’ becomes more difficult yet ever more important as new channels such as chat, mobile apps, and a variety of social media are added to existing customer communication channels.
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The state of expert networks and the rising role of LinkedIn

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It is some years now since ‘expert networks’ have become a significant force, linking subject matter experts in science, technology, and business to clients, largely in funds management and finance, usually at very healthy hourly rates. Clients such as hedge funds that are investing in particular sectors or companies want to know more about issues such as the viability of drug development processes, or when they can, about internal issues like staff turnover. A survey showed that over 40% of institutional investors found that expert networks were an “extremely” or “very important” aspect of their company research.

Clearly there is the potential for insider information to be made available if people are currently, or even possibly recently, employed by the company in question. The expert networks, most notably Gerson Lehrman Group, which is reported to control two-thirds of the market, have strict clauses in their agreements about what can be discussed by experts. But sometimes things go too far. An FBI probe into a consultant working through Gerson Lehrman Group was launched in December. The New York Times recently reported that after their success convicting Raj Rajaratnam of Galleon of insider trading, federal authorities are turning their attention to expert networks.
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Google+ may miss the big opportunity: spanning internal and external social networks

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I was delighted to get an invite to Google+. Then amazed when I was told I can’t use Google+ because we use Google Apps.

It seems that Google is expecting to make Google+ available to Google Apps users “in a few months” with some .edu users possibly trialling it sooner. As many others have expressed, it is very frustrating to be delayed several months into the hottest new social space because we are more dedicated Google users than others.

Andy Pattinson kindly pointed me to the following video and form for ‘entities’ (companies, brands etc.) to apply for a Google+ profile.

This is fair enough, but it is coming from exactly the same mindset as Facebook. Individuals build social networks around their Profiles, and companies, brands, media etc. build Pages (in Facebook) in which there are slightly different parameters on how you communicate with their network.
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China leads the world in customer service, starting at its borders

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Last night I flew into Sanya, at the southernmost tip of China, to give the keynote at the NICE Interactions 2011 conference tomorrow.

When I walked up to give my passport to the immigration official, on the counter in front of me was a box with 4 large buttons. There were green 2 smiley faces saying you were happy or very happy with your interaction, and two sad faces saying you were unhappy with the service or that it was taking too long.

My passport was quickly processed and passed back to me with a genuine smile, so I pressed the happy button.

While the Chinese visa application process requires significant documentation, both times I have applied for Chinese visas in the last couple of months I was in and out of the visa application center within minutes – it was very efficient.

So, the big question is when US immigration will learn from Chinese lessons in excellence in customer service.

The 8 sources of customer value in mobile apps and marketing

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When I recently ran a webinar series for Ketchum on Tapping the Power of Mobile, our second session focused on running successful mobile campaigns. Perhaps the most important thing that companies and agencies delving into mobile marketing need to understand is that there must be real value for customers and consumers in order for the campaign to have any success. There is an enormously deep and broad pool of mobile apps and services available, and brands will only get a look-in if they are genuinely creating value. Only at that point is there any chance of marketing value being created.

Below is a summary of the 8 sources of customer value in mobile. Any campaign that has any chance of success must be creating strong customer value in at least one of these spaces, and possibly several.


Here are examples of the 8 sources of value.
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Crowdsourcing goes mainstream, shaping organizations and the future of work

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Crowdsourcing is rapidly gaining visibility as a mainstream business topic. The current issue of Outsource magazine has a good article titled The Road of the Crowd. It was written by Steve Bynghall, who produced the recent IBF24 event run by Intranet Benchmarking Forum, and who is collaborating with me on some projects.

It’s a good article providing a nice overview of the field, and well worth reading in full. Here are some of my quotes used in the piece.
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The value of retreats: How physical space and distance creates mental space

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I am returning from a leadership development offsite for senior partners from a major professional services firm, where I ran a session on the future of business and how to talk about it with your clients.

Yesterday, from the airport I was driven out of the city for almost 2 hours, to a small upmarket resort deep in the country. As the car drove further out from ‘civilization’ I reflected on the journey. 
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Changing your Twitter profile = creating a new identity

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Yesterday I updated my Twitter profile after not having changed it for well over a year. The image and words are now:

Futurist/ Entrepreneur/ Keynote Speaker/ Author and contributor to global brain. A visual slice of my neural activity: https://bit.ly/AHTGpBizModel

In my keynotes on social media and success in a connected world I tell the audience that how you are seen online IS your identity. In our social media profiles we can select just an image and a few words that many will use to form their views of you.
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‘Aussie mafia’ sets up the “biggest startup hub in Silicon Valley”

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News just in that Elias Bizannes of Startup Bus fame is helping setting up Startup House, a 36,000 square foot space in San Francisco’s hopping SoMa district where entrepreneurs will live as well as run startups. There will be 150 desks in the lower floor, with upper levels including offices of the StartUp Bus and a number of international government agencies that want local launch pads for startups coming into the US. The intention is to run hackathons, startup weekends, and anything else that will support the local startup community.

TheNextWeb says that a group of the “Aussie mafia” (the Australian tech entrepreneur network in Silicon Valley) has bought the building and will take 6 months to transform it into this space. It notes that Plug and Play in Sunnyvale and Redwood City down the valley is bigger space-wise, but StartupHouse will probably be the biggest in San Francisco, and perhaps the biggest in the valley in a single building.

Here is a video from TheNextWeb being taken on a tour of the building – it’s an impressive space.


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