Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Penny Herscher, CEO of FirstRain (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I’m sure social media are creating whole new opportunities for your business. Why don’t we explore that, especially if you have specific customer examples?

Penny Herscher: There are two aspects that are social that are really impacting the workflow of the sales and marketing person. The first is, obviously, social media content. Twitter is the one that I’ll talk about. The second is the adoption of what people call the social enterprise, the ability to collaborate efficiently inside a social enterprise system like Chatter, on top of Salesforce or Jive. >>>

The Next President Must Have an Integrated Social Media Strategy

2012: Top Trends and Opportunities

New year. Fresh energy. Time to take stock of trends and open problems for 2012. The most notable change this coming year is that Steve Jobs is dead. In death, however, he has become even larger than life, and his legacy will drive this decade’s technology movement for a while at least. One of his key legacies is the marriage of technology and humanities, which I believe will shape the next phase of evolution in the IT industry. I elaborated my vision in Silicon Valley: The Next Decade.

In Top 10 Tech Trends For The Decade, I outlined a set of key movements which are pretty much the driving factors for the time being:

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Social Contacts: A Hairy Open Problem

Our audience of readers is full of entrepreneurs. And what do entrepreneurs do? They market and they sell. Well, at the very heart of the marketing and selling problem is the concept of lead generation. Once upon a time, it was a rather straightforward exercise of collecting names and mailing addresses, and then running direct mail campaigns. As the Internet became mainstream, this was largely replaced (at least in the universe we live in) by email marketing campaigns, so the key information was the email address of a lead.

Today, the problem has once again changed definition. Suspects and prospects are everywhere in the vast realm of social media, watching, reading, commenting, engaging. And to engage effectively with them, we need to reach them through all those various channels.

So, the definition of a lead database has expanded from being Name, Address, Email ID, Phone No, etc. to include Twitter handle, LinkedIn profile, Facebook profile, Blog URL, and more.

Yet, the process of generating such lists with all the Social Contact data remains cumbersome, time-consuming, and necessarily manual. Very little by way of technology has been applied to the problem thus far.

It needs to be.

1M/1M: Mobile and Social Apps Module Of The Curriculum Is Ready

Readers, we have just released the Mobile and Social Apps module of the 1M/1M premium curriculum. In it, you will find a synthesis of the various trends and opportunities that I see at this point, along with case studies and video lectures. I will do an additional module specifically focused on Gaming, coming soon.

Twitter Needs To Accelerate Monetization

I haven’t said all that much on Twitter thus far. The hype machine on the Internet, meanwhile, does constantly spew stuff about the microblogging service. But I will start covering Twitter once a quarter as part of our Tech Stocks coverage, alongside a few other private companies, including Facebook.

Facebook has more than 500 million users, while Twitter has nearly 200 million registered accounts. The social Web is a trend and a way of interacting that will drive the next decade of the evolution of the Internet. Facebook has become the biggest player in the social networking era, and Twitter is moving up in terms of the number of users. However, there is much the company can do for its monetization strategy. >>>

Top 10 Social Web Trends For The Decade

How do you achieve that delicate balance between the old and the new and find both depth and lightness – depth that moves at an emotional and spiritual level, lightness that moves us forward?

From Top 10 Tech Trends For The Decade:

Over 500 million people on Facebook indicates a massive shift in how consumers and businesses are viewing the social media movement. Perhaps underappreciated is the fact that everyone now is a brand. Even individuals with hundreds, if not thousands of “friends” are incessantly playing to an audience. Social games, mobile social, social apps, social news, crowd sourcing – all reinforce the trend. A tremendous amount time is being wasted on social networks, but at the same time, seriously productive and valuable work is also being done, leveraging the trend. All told, the social Web will drive the next decade’s evolution of the Internet. Personalization and privacy issues remain TBD.

Let’s take a look next at the Top 10 Social Web Trends For The Decade. >>>