Giraffe Forum

Most of the time I am a lurker. I hang around blogs not contributing. I scan forums and message boards without responding. I feel OK about this because 99% of people on the web are still lurkers to (details of recent Hitwise study below). There is a lot of web 2 hype is around user […]

The web brand is useful, clear, simple, interactive, and most importantly, customer-centric.
“Google has knocked Microsoft off the top spot and been named the most powerful global brand of 2007,” Gemma Simpson wrote for Silicon.com in April 2007. “It’s the second year in a row a tech brand has beaten household names such as Coca-Cola, Marlboro […]

The Web is changing the whole nature of marketing. The visual and imagistic is in decline; the useful and functional is on the rise. Google is the biggest brand in the world. It makes most of its revenue from advertising, and yet it has never sold a visual ad–only text ads.
Even with the growth in […]

More than 25 percent of critical data in Fortune 1,000 companies is poor quality because organizations have little experience in managing content.
Gartner Research believes that very few organizations are making progress towards professionally managing their most important data. Research Vice-President Andreas Bitterer said that “dirty data” is often overlooked as a business imperative.
“There is not […]

To understand why customers are more empowered today, we need to understand networks. Forbes has put together a very interesting series of essays on networks:
The 28 essays from a cast of experts and leaders we have assembled from many different walks of life, may help you see networks you hadn’t thought about before or make […]

Some smart advice from a customer-centric organization:
I believe that some of our best ideas have come from the people who are furthest removed from the CEO’s office - those line-level employees who interact with our customers each and every day. We’ve got a wonderful team of eccentric people working in our Manhattan store on 44th […]

A simple website charges you less time. A complex website charges you more time. Time is your most precious resource.
Simplicity is highly overrated, according to Donald Norman, a design thinker I very much admire. “I’m a champion of elegance, simplicity, and ease of use,” Norman writes. “But, as a business person, I also know that […]

I often exhort people to observe their customers trying to use their website. Sometimes this comes out as “you should do some usability testing” which sounds nerdy and doesn’t really show the centrality of observation in managing in customer centric way. This story about British retailer Tesco illustrates it perfectly….

The Web gives more power to the customer than the traditional organization. Customers can now organize in a way they never could before. From a trendwatching.com recent article, Crowd Clout:
The power of groups, the clout that crowds can exercise to get what they want, is nothing new. What is new, however, is the dizzying ease […]

Being customer-centric is about understanding the language of your customers. But language is changing at a dizzying pace on the Web. A Business Week article takes an interesting look at the phenomenon:
Making judgments about terms related to new Web technologies and activities is particularly difficult. Online, tech industry, and marketing jargon easily spreads from the […]