Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Alex Bard, VP and GM of Desk.com, a Salesforce Company (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What strikes me also is that Virgin has a good product. The service is its product, and the company is doing a nice job of its core offering, whereas United is not doing a good job with its core offering. As a result, I don’t think it’s easy to turn around a social media, customer discontent situation if your core product or service is not good. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Alex Bard, VP and GM of Desk.com, a Salesforce Company (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: This is not an easy problem to solve. It’s not easy to do social customer support, right?

Alex Bard: Well, it depends. The way we think about it is – and this is if I was giving advice to an entrepreneur or business – you have to start by listening and understanding that your customers are interacting with you and about you. You need to participate in that conversation. If we zoom out to a macro level, more companies are starting to recognize that customer support is a philosophy and not a department. It’s not a call center. It’s not a few employees whom you put at the front line. It has to make its way through the entire organization. Once you start to understand that and understand that customers are the lifeblood of any business, then you start to open yourself up to engaging with them in a way they want to engage. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Alex Bard, VP and GM of Desk.com, a Salesforce Company (Part 1)

Desk.com was founded in 2009 under the name of Assistly. The company released the premiere version of its Desk.com product in September 2010. By September 2011, the company had been acquired by Salesforce.com and Desk.com became one of many offerings that Salesforce.com provides for its international clientele.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Alex. Let’s start with a bit of context about you and the part of Salesforce.com that you’re responsible for. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Brent Lang, President of Vocera (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Clearly, you’re getting a lot of traction in the hospital segment. It makes sense to build out that segment.

Brent Lang: In terms of advice to readers who are thinking about starting businesses or growing businesses, I would say that one of the critical aspects that we spent a lot of time thinking about was trying not to be all things to all people. A good example is just in terms of the marketing context. If you’re going to try to serve multiple vertical markets, that means making a substantial investment to be able to address those markets. >>>

How I Built my Social Media Network with 1M/1M

By guest author and 1M/1M ambassador Javier Hernández

After almost three months collaborating with the One Million by One Million initiative, I can proudly say that reaching entrepreneurs and economic development organizations has been both exciting and promising. Not only because many of them were interested in joining our program or becoming our local partners, but because to they all together have significantly improved my personal network of contacts within the entrepreneurship ecosystem in my country (Spain) and globally.

Today I passed 1,000 new contacts, most of them entrepreneurs and/or influencers who either follow my Twitter account, are one of my LinkedIn connections or are my Facebook friends. How did I do it? Well, it wasn’t that difficult. 1M/1M came up with great resources and tips to make it happen. I will try to share with you all the steps I followed to reach such an astonishing number of new contacts.

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Brent Lang, President of Vocera (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In what other ways is the mobility trend affecting hospitals?

Brent Lang: A hospital is probably one of the most mobile environments in the world. There are very few workplaces you’ll go to where almost every employee is standing and walking for almost the entire day. There have been studies that showed that nurses can walk more than six miles a day. In fact, that’s one of the benefits we deliver because we’ve shown that by wearing a Vocera badge, we can reduce the number of miles a nurse walks by up to two. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Brent Lang, President of Vocera (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Essentially it acts as an intelligent phone that is optimized for a hospital’s work flow and the people in the hospital, right?

Brent Lang: Yes. You could think of it as a wearable, hands-free phone that’s controlled by using voice commands and that has an intelligent workflow engine that directs the call to the right person without having to know the person’s phone number or name. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Brent Lang, President of Vocera (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You did about $25 million in the second quarter of 2012?

Brent Lang: That’s correct. For the quarter, we did just shy of $25 million.

SM: You said a nurse can say the name of the person he’s trying to reach into his Vocera badge. Could you flesh that out a bit? Who is the nurse trying to get in touch with? And how does the work flow on the back end? >>>