“Sentiment analysis or opinion mining refers to a broad (definitionally challenged) area of natural language processing, computational linguistics and text mining. Generally speaking, it aims to determine the attitude of a speaker or a writer with respect to some topic. The attitude may be their judgment or evaluation (see appraisal theory), their affective state (that is to say, the emotional state of the author when writing) or the intended emotional communication (that is to say, the emotional effect the author wishes to have on the reader).”

And why you should care?

Social Media and Social Networking have fueled the online space. Ratings, reviews, comments, etc – are everywhere. From NYT article http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/technology/internet/24emotion.html :

“This is more than just an interesting programming exercise. For many businesses, online opinion has turned into a kind of virtual currency that can make or break a product in the marketplace.”

We tell our clients – you have to listen to what people are saying about your brand, products, services… and more importantly you should react, respond. Nicely said than done. Simple Twitter search on iPhone will give you tons of results. Is it possible for a brand to manually look at the every single mention and respond?? Of course not! Automation is the strategy… But – smart automation. As a consumer I do not want to get some irrelevant auto-response from a brand.

Solution – analysis of the unstructured texts. Not just on a set of keywords, but also on emotions. Not an easy task to do, but there are visionary companies who are working on tools/products that can help brands to deal with all these amounts of unstructured content and help them to make sense of the emotions hidden behind customer’s feedback.

We were able to gather an amazing panel of experts who will take us on a journey inside the fascinating space of sentiment analysis.

Save the date! You do not want to miss these discussions!

How Sentiment Analysis can Make Sense of Social Media (or Can it?)
Date: March 2, 2010

Location: Mountain View, CA

Time: 6:30 pm

Overview:

Ever since we realized that we needed more than mere transactional CRM data to get to know our customers and deliver on the mythical 360-degree view of them, we focused on two areas: what customers want (psychographics) and what customers feel (emotions and sentiments).
We spent the past 7-8 years figuring out direct and indirect feedback methods to try to understand what customers want and need using Enterprise Feedback Management and Surveys. We even went as far as to adopt and implement social media to capture the un-structured feedback that was latent in those interactions.
What we discovered along the way was that Social Media and unstructured feedback can be used to analyze sentiments and feelings, as customers are less controlled of their emotions when interacting in a social environment. We tried to understand the true sentiments behind the feedback and how we can use it for achieve our goals.
Alas, have we figured out how to use it and understand it? Can we really understand and use customers sentiments as metrics? What happens when we analyze for sentiments and not data? These are some of the questions we will aim to answer in this panel including:
· What is sentiment analysis?

· Does it work?

· What are the known problems?

· What are the know results?

· Should I implement it?

· What should I expect after implementation?

· What is the maintenance like?

· Is sentiment analysis for real?

· What are vendors doing about it?

Panelists:

Franco Salvetti holds a position as Senior SDE Manager of the Reference Vertical Answer team at Microsoft Bing Search (previously Natural Language Scientist at Powerset, Inc. now acquired by Microsoft) with responsibility on the scientific aspects related to Web Search Technologies (e.g., Factz and Instant Answers), and Human-Computer Interaction. Previously as a research scientist at Umbria Inc. (acquaried by J.D. Power) he worked on projects involving Information Extraction, Sentiment Analysis, Text Analysis and Graph Theory. Prior to this, he worked for Google in the area of Relation Extraction, IBM Research on a project about Social Network Analysis, Bioserve Space Technology and various start-up companies in Italy.

Jochen Frey is the CTO for Scout Labs and brings significant technical leadership and experience in scalable systems development and natural language processing to the organization. As CTO of Meaningful Machines for 5 years, Frey managed a combined onshore/offshore research and development team and deployed over $1mil in hardware to launch the world’s highest quality machine translation system (Spanish to English, with high quality prototypes for other languages including Arabic and French). He architected and oversaw implementation of high performance, failure tolerant message passing infrastructure and developed a high-speed 200GB distributed full text index. Prior to Meaningful Machines, Frey was the Director of Technology for the Eastern Region at Razorfish (previously iCube), architecting and overseeing numerous large-scale systems implementations. His past experience also includes software engineering for the US Navy and software design of risk management tools for Dresdner Bank in Frankfurt, Germany. Frey has his MS / Diplom Ingenieur in Computer Science and Medicine from the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg.

David Bean, PhD, Chief Technology Officer, Semantic Technologies, Attensity
In his role as CTO David is focused on the development of technologies that better manage and deliver superior natural language processing applications. David is the author/recipient of six patents and has over sixteen pending software patents. He is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the University of Utah’s Linguistics Department, where he teaches applied computational linguistics. David is a sought-after guest lecturer to a wide range of commercial and academic groups. He is also passionate about lecturing at the elementary school level to introduce young minds to astronomy, physics and other cool science things. Prior to Attensity, David was an IS director and an independent consultant in the healthcare industry.

Esteban Kolsky is the Founder and Principal of ThinkJar LLC, a research and consulting organization focused on multi-channel Experience Management. He currently helps clients determine how to design, implement, and manage better experiences for communities and customers across all channels, including the new media and social channels. He also conducts research on SCRM and Communiities, which is distributed through his blog “CRM Intelligence and Strategies”.
Esteban has over 22 years of experience in the Customer Service and CRM space, spending more than ten of those years working as a consultant and advisor to some of the largest global organizations on their strategies for Customer Service, CRM and Experience Management. He also spent eight years at Gartner as an analyst writing about the future of CRM and CEM, including coining the concepts for Enterprise Feedback Management and Collaborative Customer Service, two of the hottest trends in social media.

Register Here!

If you remember on October 13 our guest speaker was an incredibly talented Amber Naslund from Radian6.

Amber Naslund

Amber is a social media and marketing crackerjack and the Director of Community for Radian6, where she’s responsible for client engagement, community building, and helping companies tap the potential of online reputation management, customer engagement, and social media monitoring. She’s spent the last decade or so raising funds, building brands for companies of all sizes, and messing with all things online.

Here is a brief synopsis of her presentation:

It seems that Social Media is the latest darling of corporations. Wherever you turn, a new Twitter or Community is popping up, or a Facebook page is being deployed. The speed at which is all being released leaves almost no time for the important work of strategy and measurement. The end result is either unsatisfied expectations due to poor or no measurement, or utter confusion as to what metrics are important and how to track them.
A new breed of measurement and analytics solutions has come up in the market. Known as Social Media Monitors, they track all the relevant information for a brand, and display in very powerful, interactive dashboards and reports that also allows for integration into the corporate data warehouse for end-to-end tracking of the Social Media metrics.
Radian6 is the de-facto market leader in this new market, and the one that has built-in integrations with a large number of vendors that provide enterprise applications and social software. In this fast-paced, very informative panel they will answer the following questions:
* what is the difference between a social media metric and a regular one?
*why do you have to measure and justify a social media deployment?
* how can you track an end-to-end process with social components?
* what are you going to do with the data you collect?

Her presentation:

Event Summary

by Karen Kay

Date:  December 1, 200

Dr. Mark Drapeau is a biological scientist, government and private-sector consultant, and prolific writer on science, technology, innovation, government, and society. He is currently an adjunct faculty member in the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C

Dr Drapreau was brought to D.C. as a Fellow and worked inside the Defense Department in the National War College focused on Center for Technology and Big Trends around security for the nation.

As part of his research he explored several social media conferences and one that stood out was the Ogilvy Event that was hosted by Mashable.  Several ideas arose from this conference:

-          Was wondering why the government did not do this.

-          Kept attending more Web 2.0 events and created a road map including how USDA and CIA are using networks.

-          Obama election made this topic cause a wildfire of ideas.

-          Left the government world.

Social networking is a good thing

Not always obvious where it will lead, but it will become obvious later.  If the government uses it, should it be social networking or collaborative networking - less fun - more business. It’s controversial in the government arena and probably being fought in big companies.

Attending the SuperNova conference this week and one session he highlighted was with Anil Dash.

Anil Dash, Expertlabs is starting to hook up decision makers with people who need ideas - crowd sourcing .  Dash’s current role is directing Expert Labs, a non-profit, independent group with a mandate to help policy makers in the U.S. Federal Government utilize the expertise of their fellow citizens (from Wikipedia)

Dr. Mark encouraged us to checkout Web 2.0 Conference and learn how we can help our country without being part of the government.   This includes how to connect the disparate communities with the policy makers.

Advertising your ignorance - is a strong move

Some companies are advertising their need for input from the community and are using this knowledge to make better products.  One example is DARPA.  They have presented a challenge for someone to design a car that can drive through the dessert for xx days.

On Saturday, December 5th, 2009 at 10:00am EST, DARPA will launch ten 8-foot red balloons across the United States. If the “I Spy A Red Balloon” team is the first to submit the locations of the 10 balloons, the $40,000 prize will be donated to the American Red Cross (copied from Karen Kay’s Facebook on I Spy Red Balloon).

Word of Mouth

NASA Mars Rover is an example of using social media to get your community involved.  It became a Social billboard.

Communities and networks are great so that you can filter a lot of ideas. This is not the only thing you should have going - still stay in touch with CNN and local newspaper.

The power of the social networks is at the edges of new ideas.  One example is that the Navy does not necessarily employ the entire workforce of the brightest scientist, but they are resourceful in that they have figured out a way to share and expand their knowledge beyond their internal community.  They are doing this through social networking vehicles.

Social networking can lead to more involvement from the community with the government.

If you want something changed in the government - you need to fight the battle for a long time.  You need to have better reasons and connections and keep going.

These and many other questions were discussed at a meetup for Silicon Valley executives this week.

Panel discussions were moderated by Esteban Kolsky - the Founder and Principal of ThinkJar LLC, a research and consulting organization focused on multi-channel Experience Management.

Our panelists were:

Kira Wampler, Online Engagement Leader, Small Business Group, Intuit

From the beginning of her career, Kira Wampler has been passionately dedicated to customers. She had to given that her first job out of college was co-founder and president of her own company. She learned quickly that if you don’t serve your customers, you don’t eat! Nearly fifteen years later, Kira continues to bring her passion for customers to life at Intuit by driving community, social media and online engagement efforts that small business owners succeed. Prior to her current role, Kira helped launch Intuit’s community for budding entrepreneurs and developed Intuit’s Small Business Group’s policies, strategy and testing efforts around Word of Mouth Marketing. Kira received her MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and can be found on the social web on Twitter @kirasw.

Waladeen Norwood, Program Manger, Social Media, Consumer Support Organization

Waladeen Norwood recently joined HP in the Global Unassisted Support Organization as a Social Media Program Manger working on developing strategies for supporting consumers over new social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. Before joining HP, Waladeen consulted for Broadjam.com, one of the largest Web 2.0 online communities for independent musicians. While completing his graduate studies, he helped Broadjam.com develop strategies to grow its song metadata business using wiki crowdsourcing methods.

Natalie Petouhoff, Senior Senior Analyst, Customer Service at Forrester Research

Natalie serves Business Process & Applications professionals, Customer Experience professionals, customer service and social media professionals as part of the business and process applications group at Forrester. As a leading expert, she is often quoted in the press and on television on how the top companies provide great experiences and retain loyal customers. She reviews customer service vendors and provides leaders with guidance on how to integrate social media applications and platforms into the contact center and the customer experience. Her research on customer service best practices via the FastForward Innovation Framework includes six areas around people, process, and technology, as well as integrating organizational change management as part of an initiative to reduce risk and ensure higher ROI for the investment. In addition, Natalie’s model on the ROI of social media is helping companies justify this as part of their enterprise technology and customer experience strategy.

Natalie has more than 20 years of leadership experience in management consulting and systems integration firms, including PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting, Hitachi Consulting, and BenchmarkPortal. Her years of practical experience in industry were gained at companies like General Electric, Sony Pictures, General Motors, and Hughes Electronics. Natalie is also the author of four books:

•Reinventing Your Contact Center: Managers Guide To Managing Multi-Channel Contact Centers
•Integrating Your People with Process and CRM Technology: Change Management That Provides An ROI
•CRM: The Bottom Line to Optimizing Your ROI
•Recruiting and Retaining Call Center Employees
Natalie’s articles appear in BusinessWeek, CRM Magazine, Customer Interactions Solutions, CustomerThink.com, Fast Company, The New York Times, and Peppers and Rogers 1-to-1 Magazine.

As accomplished public speaker, Natalie is a keynote speaker at events including, Destination CRM Evolution Conference, ICMI Conference, Call Center 2.0, Shared Insights Self-Service Conference, SOCAP, and Pepperdine’s Business Forum.

Here is a video recording of the first hour of this panel:

We have very good discussions on event management wave best practices within this wave.

Your comments/suggestions are greatly appreciated!

Tatyana (@glfceo)

Panel: Debra Bowen, California Secretary of State, Beth Kanter, Fellow at Packard Foundation, Gwyneth Gailbraith, Director of Development and Evaluation, Opportunity Fund

Initial thoughts on social media use in their respective areas:

Debra Bowen commented on the need to engage people in the process.  The voter outreach program, as one example, showed the need to work collaboratively and leverage networks to effectively stay in touch by using Social Media.

Beth Kanter highlighted that by taking advantage of the social cultures out there and encouraging conversation through social media that when you do need to “rally” an effort, you already have a passionate audience engaged.

Gwyneth Gailbraith is focused on small business lending, match savings programs for education and small business ventures.  Social media helps them build a field for the U.S.  There are taking small steps to integrate social media into their outreach programs.

Non-profits and how they intersect with the government.  How to use these tools to effectively?

Alan - fear of change - some feel that their livelihoods may disappear because they will be replaced by these tools.

Debra brought up a great point that with this new media, you increase communication, which is great.  However, you still have the same number of staff to respond.  You need to come up with a process to encourage people to seek first for the information on the web-site and if it’s not on the web-site - then send in a question.  This is still a work in process.  Biggest hurdle for adoption - government officials are not tech experts and that due to 140 characters - subtleties can be lost.  Once you hit enter - it’s out there.

Beth introduced the idea of network weaving.  She has developed a way to get her network to become self-organized and she acts more as a project manager.  She will start conversations and let the network takeover the discussion.  Some monitoring and input from her will keep the conversation flowing.

Beth used the Michael Vick story as an example.  When he decided to come back and volunteer with the humane society - their social media person -raised the visibility of this activity, people were allowed to vent their opinions, have a conversation and then eventually the situation was diffused.

Gwyneth reminded that due to her audience it is necessary to take baby steps right now.  Have found volunteers to help them by tweeting and giving them guidance on where they should be focused.  One problem they would like to solve is the immense reporting requirements for CDFI funds, as an example.  They are exploring how to use social media to make this process easier.

Alan revisited his idea of fear of change.  If he was able to build a web-site in 41 days, but when you take this conversation to a government agency - there is a six month bid and longer decision making process.  Is there fear of change or people losing their livelihoods?

Debra - you need to involve people in the formative part of the project.  This allows for people to be part of the process and gain their buy-in.

Beth - most of the fear is from within.  If a non-profit does not have a social internal culture, you need to create this before you can go external.  Common concerns she has heard from non-profits include: “It will make us look more human”, “opens us up to public criticism and we prefer it does not exist”, etc., etc.  It will open the floodgates of information and that will overload us.

Alan asked Gwyneth:  “Are small business adopting these tools?”

Gwyneth’s response:  Not all businesses need a social media strategy.  A child care business in a home does not need a web-site, etc.   Really need to have a social media plan to understand what you are trying to achieve and not necessarily try to do everything.    Need to show clients how their information will be used and the good results and potential pitfalls.  Most are really excited to know that people all over the world are inspired by their story.

Some general trends discussed included:

1.      Alan spoke about the most recent Iran election and the tools were used to help promote  an information forum to help with the election process.

2.      How do you bring a social media strategy into an organization - Beth mentioned that have a group of people model the behavior you want them to adopt.

3.      Non-profits that need help with starting their social media projects - Beth said on her twitter site there is a list of non-profit twitters and chose the non-profit tech twitters.

4.      Debra brought up using social media, once you are established and familiar,can take as little as 10 minutes a day.

I thoroughly enjoyed this event.  There was a great group of non-profits in the audience who were impressed with the valuable information they received.  Good networking exchange before and after the event.  The group was large enough for broad conversations, but small enough that you got a chance to meet and exchange ideas with several people.

Karen Kay
karenlee.kay@gmail.com

Showcasing how “smart deployment’ and adoption of new tools are already revolutionizing how these three areas function individually, and how new tools allow cross integration like never before.

What success stories are in place now?

How can the marrying of technology, Government and Non Profits help to bring a better and more secure society?

Moderator: Alan W. Silberberg
Alan is the Co-Founder and CEO of the Political and Social Advocacy website, You2Gov.org. You2Gov created an innovative and ground breaking Government 2.0 platform that connects regular people to their Elected Officials at the White House, Congress, All 50 Legislatures and State Capitols. The platform is also a private label social network that marries four major technologies into one completely customizable platform, Advocacy, Social Networking, CRM and CMS. You2Gov currently serves clients in the Federal Government, Private Companies and Several State Governments in the US. Alan is a frequent speaker on Government 2.0 issues surrounding development and implementation of innovative and trans-formative technologies. He was a panelist at the Open Government and Innovations Conference, and Sponsor and Speaker at CongressCamp among others.
Panelists:
Beth Kanter
Beth is the author of Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media (http://beth.typepad.c…, one of the longest running and most popular blogs for nonprofits. A frequent contributor to many nonprofit technology web sites,blogs, and magazines, Beth has authored chapters in several books, including “Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission: A Strategic Guide for Nonprofit Leaders,” edited by NTEN both published in 2009. A much in demand speaker and trainer, she was the keynote speaker for the Cambodian Bloggers Conference in Phnom Penh, The Connecting Up Conference in Brisbane, Australia, Minnesota Council on Nonprofits, Making Media Conference in Chicago and others. She has presented about nonprofits and social media at some of the leading social media industry conferences including O’Reilly’s Graphing Social Patterns, Gnomedex, SWSX, Blogher, and Podcamp. She is curating NTEN’s “We Are Media: Nonprofit Social Media Starter Kit,” an online community of people from nonprofits who are interested in learning and teaching about how social media strategies and tools can enable nonprofit organizations to create, compile, and distribute their stories and change the world. In 2009, she was named by Fast Company Magazine as one of the most influential women in technology and one of Business Week’s “Voices of Innovation for Social Media.” She is the 2009 Visting Scholar for Social Media and Nonprofits for the Packard Foundation. Her book, The Networked Nonprofit, co-authored with Allison Fine, will be published by Wiley in 2010.

Gwyneth Galbraith
Opportunity Fund is one of the largest microlenders in California. Previously, she was a strategic development consultant focused on major gifts fundraising, strategic planning, communications, and financial analysis for a variety of nonprofits, including Opportunity Fund, The Rockridge Institute, and the Arthur Ross Gallery. Gwyneth spent five years as a development director at the University of California, Berkeley, and has also worked at the University of Chicago and The New Yorker magazine. Gwyneth holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from UC Berkeley. She serves on the Advisory Board for the Center for Nonprofit and Public Leadership at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.

Since its founding in 1995, Opportunity Fund has originated $9.8 million in loans to small businesses and has invested more than $130 million into needy communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. Opportunity Fund’s leadership team has received the Skoll Award for Innovation in Silicon Valley, the Wachovia Impact award, the James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award and the SBA Financial Services Advocate of the Year. In addition to the Small Business Loan Program, Opportunity Fund operates one of the largest matched-savings account programs in the country and is a leader in providing innovative financing to community real estate projects in the Bay Area.

Debra Bowen
A pioneer in open government reform, election integrity, and personal privacy rights, Debra Bowen became only the sixth woman in California history elected to a statewide constitutional office when she was elected as Secretary of State in November 2006.

As the chief elections officer for the largest state in the nation, Secretary Bowen is responsible for overseeing state and federal elections, a role that also requires her to test and certify the voting equipment used in California. Her goal is to ensure that voting machines certified for use in Californians elections are secure, accurate, reliable, and accessible, and every voter’s ballot is counted exactly as it was cast. In her first year in office, Secretary Bowen commissioned an independent, top-to-bottom review of voting technology, as well as a comprehensive review of the state’s decades-old election auditing standards. Following the top-to-bottom review, Bowen strictly limited the use of direct recording electronic voting machines, and imposed significant security and auditing requirements on systems used in California elections. Secretary Bowen was recognized for her national leadership in election integrity with the 2008 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage AwardTM, the nation’s most prestigious honor for elected public servants who choose principles over partisanship.

Feedback says it all!

Greatly anticipated panel discussions on SCRMdefinitely met expectations!

More about the panel:
Moderator: Esteban Kolsky

Esteban Kolsky is the Founder and Principal of ThinkJar LLC, a research and consulting organization focused on multi-channel Experience Management. He currently helps clients determine how to design, implement, and manage better experiences for communities and customers across all channels, including the new media and social channels. He also conducts research on SCRM and Communiities, which is distributed through his blog “CRM Intelligence and Strategies”.

Esteban has over 22 years of experience in the Customer Service and CRM space, spending more than ten of those years working as a consultant and advisor to some of the largest global organizations on their strategies for Customer Service, CRM and Experience Management. He also spent eight years at Gartner as an analyst writing about the future of CRM and CEM, including coining the concepts for Enterprise Feedback Management and Collaborative Customer Service, two of the hottest trends in social media.

Lyle Fong, CEO and Co-Founder Lithium

Lyle Fong is the CEO & Co-Founder of Lithium Technologies, the leading provider of Social CRM solutions to power the customer network. Working with market leaders such as Best Buy, Sony, AT&T, Research In Motion Limited (RIM), Univision, and PayPal, Lithium is delivering the next generation of customer relationships, combining the power of online customer communities with the broader social web and traditional CRM business processes to inspire customers to innovate, promote, and support on the company’s behalf.

Prior to starting Lithium Technologies, Lyle co-founded GX Media, where he was the CTO. He drove the development of Gamers.com, which was rated the #1 independent gaming portal by Nielsen NetRatings. Lyle was instrumental in raising a total of $15M in funding led by CMGI, negotiating multi-million dollar technology licensing deals with Dell, Sony, AltaVista, and Ziff-Davis, and spearheading the spin-off of Lithium Technologies. Lyle was also the driving force behind the creation of technologies for professional gaming, including a global rankings system, tournament engine, and a real-time match reporting and spectating system. These technologies were the key success factors behind the AMD PGL, the most successful and highly acclaimed professional gaming league to date with over 100 million media impressions, and also numerous tournaments for Sega.

Anthony Lye, SVP Products, Oracle

Anthony Lye is the senior vice president of CRM, responsible for the Oracle CRM and Siebel CRM On Demand businesses worldwide at Oracle. Previously Mr. Lye was the group vice president of CRM Products at Oracle, responsible for Oracle’s CRM product strategy and product management for CRM in the applications development organization.

Prior to joining Oracle in 2006, Mr. Lye was the group vice president and GM of CRM products at Siebel Systems. Anthony was responsible for Siebel’s vertical and horizontal CRM application technologies. Mr. Lye managed and directed all of Siebel’s enterprise application strategy, product marketing and product management.

Prior to Siebel, Mr. Lye spent six years as president and CEO of ePeople, a company he ran with help and investment from David Stamm, founder of Clarify and Steve Goldsworthy, founder of Vantive. Prior to ePeople, Mr. Lye was the vice president of marketing at Categoric Software in the enterprise event management business, was senior director and general manager at Remedy Corporation for five years for global major accounts, strategic alliances and Remedy’s international business operations. Mr. Lye also worked in product marketing at Tivoli Systems and was a management consultant focused on distributed systems at Arthur Anderson, now Accenture, in the financial services vertical in London and New York.

Anthony Nemelka, Social CRM Pioneer and former CEO of Helpstream

Tony Nemelka is the co-founder and former CEO of Helpstream, Inc., a venture-backed Software-as-a-Service company located in Mountain View, California. Tony was the visionary behind Helpstream when he and co-founder Dan Hardy set out to design and develop a radically new software application for customer service and customer relationship management – now referred to as Social CRM.
Tony’s vision of infusing business processes with social technologies made available via the Web, and leveraging online communities to drive more effective interaction and engagement between companies and their customers, resulted in one of the first commercially available and highly acclaimed Social CRM products in the market – Helpstream. Tony served as Helpstream’s CEO from January 2006 through July 2009.

Prior to Helpstream, Tony was Vice President of the Asia Pacific region at Adobe Systems, responsible for sales and services across a region that includes both the fastest growing and most technologically sophisticated markets in the world — China, India, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, and Australia. He lived in Japan for several years where he was Founder and CEO of Epiphany Japan and General Manager and President of PeopleSoft Japan. He speaks fluent Japanese and some Chinese. Tony started his career at IBM, spending 13 years marketing a wide variety of hardware, software, and services across multiple industries from 1986 through 1998.

Christopher Carfi, Author of The Social Customer Manifesto and Thought Leader in SCRM

Currently, I’m a co-founder of Cerado, Inc.
We work with companies to help them to understand what their customers are thinking (by doing crazy things like going out and having conversations with those customers). We also help our clients understand what their competitors are doing, so they can thwart them at every turn. Most of our customers turn to us for services such as Win/Loss Analysis and Competitive Intelligence*.
I’ve spent the last six or so years working with organizations to help them better connect with their customers at a real, non-synthetic level. Hence the interests in things like blogs, wikis, and social networks.

Photos from the event:

The main point has been proved: SCRM is REAL!

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“ Great topic — very useful to organizations. Intuit is leading the way. The speaker Tad Milbourn was very polished, very good at leading group discussion regarding his new product to manage innovation, Brainstorm. I was impressed from start to finish. Look forward to learning more new things at the next CIO meetup. Thanks, Tatyana! - marymac ”

“ Tad gave a great perspective on tools, culture, & collaboration, and how the Brainstorm tool fits in. Excellent use cases and discussion of overall vision. I’ll have a blog post out on this by the end of the week: TerriGriffith.com/blog ”

You can read more about this talk here.

One day - about 10 days prior to the event, checking all the confirmed attendees.. something clicked in my mind - there are so many very smart, exciting people flying in from all over the state and I should really try to get some of them to speak at one of my events.

The immediate first choice was to approach the team from Dell. I knew how well Dell was utilizing social media channels - they even were able to tie the use of those channels to the real life $$$.

Luckily for me, Richard and Lionel were staying in Bay Area for another day or so after the #tBASH and agreed to present! I was so happy!

What made me even happier was the feedback that was left after the event by attendees:

“ Great speakers. Good insight from their experience with social media. ”

“ Truly one of the most insightful presentations yet. Richard Binhammer and Lionel Menchaca are clearly writing the book on how a large company should/could utilize social media to identify issues, defuse complaints, generate ideas from the user base and regain status for a brand. They have gone further than many in developing the metrics and ROI for social media, and in creating collaboration and referral processes that engage other teams in the company. Thanks again to Tatyana for offering great food for thought and, as usual, for the palate. ”

“ Outstanding Meetup … These events just keep getting better. Enjoyed learning from front-liners Richard and Lionel exactly how Dell is making it happen and the processes they follow to ensure success. Two hours went by far too quickly. ”

“ Lionel and Richard provided great hands-on, practical social media experience, and were great presenters. Highly recommend! ”

Do I need to add anything else?!

Video [first hour] from the event: