Dealing with the move from the Industrial Era to the Digital Era was tough for many companies. And now we are in the middle of yet another transformation of comparable magnitude. Today’s customers, clients and consumers are instrumented, interconnected, intelligent, engaged, informed and empowered. They want companies they buy from to interact with them on their terms and personalize marketing offers and customer support. They even want personalized products and services. It’s called the Connected Customer Era. Early adopters of quality improvement methods in the Industrial Era gained competitive advantage. In the movement to the Digital Era, early adopters of automated, efficient back-offices and strong web presences won. As the Digital Era matured, traditional strategies to maintain margins – cost containment, product innovation, branding and marketing communications – became far less effective because they did little to nothing to offset the multiple forces…
A business model turning big data into smart data
Companies are increasingly finding that “Big Data” doesn’t mean “Smart Data.” And that difference is opening up a new business opportunity for software and consulting firms to turn big data into actionable and profitable insight. One of those firms is 18-month-old Zoomph. Founder Ali R. Manouchehri says their platform turns “big data into little data” by enabling marketers to listen, curate, analyze, visualize and syndicate social media content in real time. With Zoomph, clients find the most relevant influencers, engage in real-time polls and create engaging and inspiring visualizations of social media content for their websites, mobile devices and other screens (e.g., football score boards, event displays and lobby screens). Zoomph projects encompass a broad array. On one end is figuring out if social media conversations on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram containing the term “pressure cooker” are about terrorism, bridal gifts or cooking….
Acquisition PacMan weakens the business model
The developers of Pac-Man built an arcade game so esteemed that it resides in the US Smithsonian Institution and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Millions of players have moved their rounded Pac-Man figure through a maze – eating small dots and earning points – while trying to avoid getting eaten by the four monsters in hot pursuit. The game is a great analogy for the economy’s industry consolidation since Pac-Man’s debut in the early 1980s. The legal industry is a recent example of companies “eating” other companies. For years, large law practices have acquired smaller firms to both build broader geographic reach. Now the large law firms are in potential merger talks with each other. What’s driving these talks? By leveraging overhead costs, mergers enable partners to improve profits and protect their bonuses in the face of falling revenue. The revenue shortfall…