thomas.wieberneit@aheadcrm.co.nz
Is a Twitter acquisition pending? A Snap Analysis

Is a Twitter acquisition pending? A Snap Analysis

by | Sep 24, 2016 | Blog |

Back in June most of us got surprised by the news that Microsoft has acquired LinkedIn. Neither of us deemed this a bad move from a company point of view. There ae just too many potential synergies between MS Dynamics CRM, Office365, Azure on one side and LinkedIn, as the leading business network on the other. At that time many of us, including myself, were musing about when Twitter will be acquired, and by who. #MSFT acquired #LinkedIn – Twitter now the last source of global personal #data. Is it up for grabs? Who would buy? #AAPL? #Google? — Thomas Wieberneit (@twieberneit) June 16, 2016 thinking of it – @SAP might find Twitter a good match, looking at their recent offerings #bigdata #AI #analytics https://t.co/sgUpcLgRBK — Thomas Wieberneit (@twieberneit) June 16, 2016 My initial guesses have been Apple or Google, then suggesting SAP to have a look into it. Thinking of it I could have added Oracle, IBM and Salesforce or media companies including telcos into the mix. In brief, a lot of companies should be interested in the treasure pit of data, behavioral data, that Twitter holds. Why? There are multiple reasons. Twitter is the last remaining independent social media outside Facebook and the big Chinese ones that the big western companies will not get access to; Tencent, Alibaba, Momo, etc. are rather buying it themselves than being for sale (to a western company), Facebook doesn’t need to. Twitter has a profitability and growth challenge, but an interesting technology and, importantly, is a great source of real time information about a lot of topics, from business to consumer....

Social CRM for Retail – Threats and Solutions

by | Dec 3, 2012 | Blog |

Brick-and-mortar retail businesses face a combination of ever-increasing customer expectations, customers being “educated” to expect and receive promotions, and of course an ever increasing competition in the market place for their customers’ share of mind and share of wallet. On top of all this they need to realize that they do not control the communication to their customers anymore, let alone being capable of controlling the communication in between their customers. As many bloggers, including myself, and analysts already stated, the advent of extremely user friendly and ubiquitous mobile devices and web applications essentially decoupled retailers from communications between their customers and even led to their marketing messages becoming part of the “background noise” for lots of consumers – just something one filters out when it comes to getting serious information. Of course there are exceptions, especially considering that retail businesses reacted to this threat. For retailers it is about being where the customers are. This started with setting up transactional web sites (web shops) to drive additional sales, using more and different ways to address customers, e.g. setting up and participating in communities, building fan pages on Facebook, Twitter streams, keeping in touch with exciting new services like Groupon, building capabilities to monitor and participate in discussions in forums, creating loyalty programs, and so on. Quite some of the challenges facing retailers have the potential of being disruptive to their business models. Take Groupon as an example: Groupon is the successful implementation of a scheme that shifts the power balance drastically to the buyer (consumer) side; the scheme is similar to the earlier development of retailer purchase organizations...