The Semacraft Blog

Social CRM is a fairly new concept. I love Paul Greenberg’s definition of it because it allows me to evaluate vendor offerings. He says (tweetable version) that it’s “a company’s response to the customer’s control of the conversation”.

Any CRM system that still attempts to put customer data in a silo and generate a company-side-only view of the data is obviously a traditional CRM. Read the rest of this entry »

In Africa, the image of a group of (usually men) sitting under a tree talking is fairly common.  In fact, many villages had a ‘the tree’ where people met to have informal meetings or just impromptu ones.  If you were new in the village, you made stopping by the tree one of your priorities (unless there was an invitation only meeting happening). When formal [read Western] education was introduced, it also happened under a tree. At least until the classrooms were put up. Read the rest of this entry »

Strategy is great. I love strategy. I live for strategy. However, without execution strategy is just wishful thinking. A picture of a great product.

Execution is when we go from picture to product and ship it. I think the risk of contracting Paralysis of Analysis for many business owners can be fairly high so a way of getting out of it as early as possible is critical. I have found that these four things help me get out of paralysis and give my strategies life by executing them. Read the rest of this entry »

Is your brand relevant?

If you’ve been in business a while, it probably is. Otherwise you’d have folded long ago. Now your brand wants to be ‘social’ and blog, tweet and get a Facebook page or YouTube channel. This is now publishing territory. Are you publishing relevant content? Is it all about your product and your brand/business? If you consider the fact that building significant loyal traffic to a blog can take 2 years, is there enough talk about yourself to keep me reading your blog for two whole years?! Read the rest of this entry »

Work for free.  It’s a radical concept isn’t it? I posed the question to friend of mine a few hours ago. It was clear by the look on their face that they thought it was an incredulous idea. “Impossible!”, they said.

I’ll put the question to you a little differently.  If all your bills were paid, would you still do what you do? Would your business still go about it’s business the same way? Would you tweet the same stuff? Post the same Facebook updates? Read the rest of this entry »