CNNmoney.com has a great article detailing some of the biggest corporate blunders we’ve seen so far this year, and quite a few of them are customer and branding related, such as GM, Tropicana, and my New York Yankees.

Now obviously it’s easy to sit back and play Monday morning quarterback when it’s all said and done, especially when it’s a multi-billion dollar company. But if there’s one common trend among many of these it’s the impact that blogging and consumer – controlled, Web 2.0 feedback has had on product announcements such as these.

Before the Internet, perception management was subjective at best, and branding was more an art than a science. That concept has gone right out the window with the advent of blogs, social networking sites, etc. But on the flip side, it’s also given product and marketing managers an opportunity to turn the table and leverage the Internet as a tool to draw feedback on consumer’s perception of your business…and in the process avoid launching something that looks like this:

This was GM’s idea at remaking itself as a purveyor of fuel-efficient vehicles?

I had an interesting call with the media today around Twitter as a sales and marketing tool. The reporter referenced the fact (I guess it’s a fact as I’m just taking her word for it) that Dell was able to promote a special laptop through Twitter and saw a major spike in sales. In the reporter’s eyes - this shows that Twitter is a closing tool.

I disagree.

While Dell was able to generate consumer interest via Twitter - it was the Dell site that actually enabled a pleasing enough experience that incited customers to buy. Twitter was the medium, not the end.

This applies to more than just Twitter but really to the purpose of social networks in general. The larger the network, I would argue, the more that actual tasks or processes get completed elsewhere. (What I am saying is, yes, I do understand there are online collaborative social networks where an exact outcome is desired online.) Look at LinkedIn - it has become less of a “job site” (I don’t think I have ever even searched their jobs listings) than it has been a networking resource. You don’t get your job via LinkedIn, you get your job because your skills are easily viewed and compared to others on LinkedIn. Seriously, imagine getting an offer letter in your LinkedIn inbox…weird.

Ultimately, these concepts are important, because understanding what role social media plays in your customer lifecycle will allow you to put the right metrics in place to more effectively measure your social media initiatives.

I had an interesting conversation this morning with a customer who is currently in the process of reengineering the way in which it measures and processes customer feedback. Value-based metrics can be misleading, and it seems too often companies are making the mistake of misinterpreting or overvaluing, as this business discovered, customer loyalty and other related metrics.

What we measure as loyalty is not always real loyalty. And while there are countless studies that correlate loyalty and re-purchasing, wallet-share, increased value, etc., I think many businesses make the mistake of tracking two distinct metrics and establishing a nonexistent relationship between them.

Customer segmentation across different demographical, sociological, or behavioral buckets can often mislead analysts about the true correlation between customer loyalty and profitability. CRM has always been good at tracking and correlating transactional and behavioral information, but attitudinal data, which is what customer loyalty seeks to capture, is a very popular, but still very separate measurement that the industry is still figuring out how to add into the analytical mix.

When it comes down to it, I don’t believe there’s a concrete, proven method that can denote whether a specific customer will continue to do business with a company, at least not for the broad range of businesses out there. Segmenting your customer base, finding the key metrics for each, and co-relating those based on historical actions…with customer loyalty acting as a sort of third-party opinion…seems the best route to go.

A survey/study of the CEOs of Fortune 100 companies reveals that social media is not a priority.

Well, I understand that CEOs of the world’s largest companies are probably pretty busy. But to have no Fortune 100 CEOs writing blogs, and only a few using Twitter, seems rather odd. I mean, wouldn’t you want a figurehead to be one of the people extending your brand?

As the linked blog post suggests - this leaves me with the notion that most CEOs are “old school” and simply don’t get the power of social media in today’s economy.

But what is the answer. On the one hand, these brands come off as stodgy and out of touch. But to force a CEO into the whirlpool of social media could have other consequences. The consumers and business partners out there in the 2.0 universe are savvy, and can pick up the scent of hacked together, phony social strategies like a shark in bloody water.

To come off as just trying for the sake of it can sometimes be worse than not trying at all. There’s a fine balance here.

In my opinion, I think these CEOs, and their firms, should be (if they are not already) taking a careful look at the engagement and interaction strategy of their highest managers. Consumers of all products and services (B2B and B2C alike) are expecting transparency and essentially to be presented with a flat organization (even if it isn’t flat at all) that is dedicated top to bottom to creating a strong customer experience.

I don’t have all the answers…but it seems like there is so much low hanging fruit here that it wouldn’t take a social media genius to get it all started.

The concept of home-based employees servicing clients virtually has always carried a ton of merit, but outside of the call center industry, few real world examples. SaaS and other advancements in communication and Internet infrastructure was the first big step in the right direction, but still left the concept very much the part of enterprises and midmarket-size businesses.

For the first time, Web 2.0 is providing the tools by which to drastically alter the landscape and the way in which we work and interact, particularly for small businesses. Fortunately we have one customer that can speak to this, and how SugarCRM can be leveraged with Web 2.0 to fulfill such a work environment.

Check it our here.

I came across a fresh report by Information Technology Intelligence that only 15 percent of the 300 enterprise companies surveyed will adopt cloud computing over the coming year. The figures don’t surprise me, nor do I think they should surprise others as well, as plenty of industry surveys have shown similar results.

While Information Technology Intelligence doesn’t provide a sound description of what they’re definition of cloud computing is, judging by the context of the report, it seems they’re going with the typical SaaS = cloud computing equation most have adopted.

Despite its maturity, I still think the SaaS/cloud computing concept is battling some red herring issues that are preventing it from reaching mainstream adoption among the big boys. Security remains one. There’s no reason why cloud-based systems should be less secure than on-premise ones, but the fact remains that they can be. I think many SaaS-only vendors have had some lapses that continue to provide on-premise vendors with an advantage.

In addition, long and high-variance communication latencies, dependency on distributed infrastructure networks, and lack of the hands-on control many CIOs require are still providing resistance.

Finally, I think on-premise vendors are doing a bang-up job with their products in two ways that really matter:

- Low-priced monthly subscription pricing with premium on ease of installation and entry

- Taking a grassroots adoption, one click at a time, based on usability and control as the core advantages.

There are always hidden costs and inconveniences that don’t make it into the marketing hype. In that sense, the current cloud frenzy reminds me a lot of the off-shore software development/service outsourcing frenzy of a few years ago. That “revolution” rapidly shrank to something much more marginalized as the realities of long-distance development and lack of control set in. I imagine that cloud computing and SaaS will continue to experience the same moving forward.

When it comes down to it, SaaS can represent a brilliant application structure in certain niches, but not so much in others. Certain classes of applications and operating environments will never make sense within the limitations of vendor-hosted cloud computing, thanks mostly to the reasons I mentioned above. Yet, still other situations and application sets have such stable usage patterns that it’s hard to imagine how businesses could survive without it.

I was hesitant to jump on the news that SaaS BI player LucidEra might be closing up shop for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that I wasn’t sure if the rumors were true. Also, I really like the company head Ken Rudin and really liked his model of disrupting the very expensive and cost prohibitive BI models that permeated the market when Ken got LucidEra up and running a few years ago. In short, I really wanted the company to make it.

But in this economy - and I mean that in a general evolutionary sense not just in a “here and now” sense - it is going to take a lot to not only survive, but bring down entrenched players and established industry trends. SaaS is proving not to be a license to print money - far from it.

More important - as I see small and large BI providers scramble to offer LucidEra customers migration options - the value of an open cloud becomes ever more clear.

Think about this - had LucidEra also provided its customers with the capability to take a low-cost, low maintenance BI engine on site - then a lot (if not all) of its customers would not be forced to search for another data intelligence provider. Now, I know BI is slightly different that a CRM system - but at the same time the longer development cycle of BI engines (in my opinion) lends itself to open source.

I believe the stability of BI engines lends itself to being able to be run without major incident or upgrade decisions in-house for an even longer cycle than a CRM system, for example. So, given an open cloud model where users have the luxury of portability, these types of stories might not seem as tragic or as much of a pressing concern to end user organizations.

It’s tough to see any silver lining in a story like this, but at least it does show the value of offering choice and portability in cloud-based solutions.

A friend of mine that works for Nokia recently forwarded me these videos from rival Kodak, which among other things, caught my attention for their degree of honesty and humor around a company that had seriously lost touch with consumers.

Here’s a great example of a business rebranding, or reinventing itself to the consumer, and in a comic manner by embracing its past – the Kodak moment – with the reality of where we live today. As my friend can attest to, Kodak was once second to none in the camera market, but one that had gradually fallen off in recent years with consumers who no longer viewed the business as up-to-date with the digital age.

Here are two “Winds of Change” videos that embrace what once made Kodak great and a message that things have changed and Kodak is back. They’re also both quite funny.

While Google has publicly said it is not building “enterprise applications” and there is no future roadmap for such. But, does that mean Google will never be in the CRM or related apps game?

I am not so sure.

What I mean is that Google could enter the CRM market in at least two distinct ways. One, on the very low end of the CRM spectrum, its Outlook integration tools are very similar to base CRM capabilities. In the old contact management world, all that was missing was strong email integration. With that, Google has the basics in place.

Secondly, as a cloud provider, Google could partner with the right application providers to deliver CRM functionality - either simple or complex permutations - to end user organizations. Google could also open up its huge cloud infrastructure and have companies store apps they’ve licensed from other CRM providers on their own Google server account. So, while Google is not building any full-fledged applications, this is not to say it has no plans to get in the game in some other way.

Guess we’ll just have to wait and see…

In the never-ending battle between Web-based advertising and privacy, it seems the consumer is slowly taking back control. The technology has become so mature, the processes primed, that you’re seeing government agencies and trade groups step in to try to give consumers more control over how their private information is used online.

Sears was recently nailed by the FTC for not adequately informing visitors about its monitoring and in the coming weeks a number of advertising and Internet trade groups plane to announce new guidelines as well.

The online marketplace has become so dynamic that protecting consumer’s rights have become difficult. Laws enacted a few years ago are already obsolete, and the pace at which technology advances means that online marketing continues to become more pervasive. I suspect the problem is only going to get more complicated, as Obama has pledged action on several issues affecting e-commerce, including online privacy and extending broadband Internet access throughout the country.

At the core of the problem is behavioral targeting, and marketers efforts to walk the fine line between achieving online results and abiding to some sense of permission-based initiatives. Some are talking about forcing Websites to add a small icon that allows consumers to see what information that site is tracking upon clicking on it. If measures like that or similiar regulations go through, I could imagine it would lead to a host of Website redesigns.

The scary part is that for as good as marketers have become at leveraging beharioral targeting, they can still get a lot better. Many companies still don’t measure or have the data sets required to take full advantage of the technology.

That said, while technology will continue to present its problems and answers, it’s an issue that I think needs to be ultimately contained through education, advocacy, and certain product constraints, as it’s in marketers’ best interest to use self-regulation as a means to keep consumers satisfied.