Giraffe Forum

On the Web a new type of customer is rising. One more and more immune to marketing happy talk. One that wants facts before emotion.
In his seminal book, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins explores the idea of the sustainable ecosystem. In one game of life there were three players: suckers; cheats and grudgers.
Each player […]

The web customer is not a fool. The specific reason they are on the Web is to compare and evaluate. Give them the facts.
Some airlines have an incredibly underhanded approach to pricing. Aer Lingus is an airline I fly with almost once a week. It is dramatically better than it was five years ago, but […]

From a closed, centralized, cohesive unit, the organization is being changed by the Web into an open, dispersed, cohesive network.
There are few better websites than the BBC, and there are few organizations that truly get what the Web is about better than the BBC. I came across a set of 15 BBC Web Principles some […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Toby Ward’s excellent series of intranet case studies illustrates, through a Nordea case study, an often underestimated dimension of intranet success: Senior managers personal use of the intranet.
We all want “management support”, right? Well, often enough we have it. In words. They say they understand and value the intranet. They want it to be the […]