Microsoft Corporation launched the results of its “Global Small Business Index, October 2008” looking at how small businesses use and manage their IT, as well as their attitudes toward hosted IT services. There is a growing demand for software as a service worldwide.

Findings vary across the board from country to country:

- Half of the small organizations were found to receive some kind of information or support from public services or government bodies. The exceptions were Russia, where the figure is 32 percent; Italy, where it is 39 percent; and Japan, where the figure is 40 percent.

- Overall, 61 percent of respondents said that professional-looking communications were either “critical” or “very important.” Swedish, Russian and Australian small businesses are especially keen to promote the professional image, while Japanese and Chinese small businesses thought it a lower priority.

- While only 15 percent of respondents noted “IT issues” as one of their top three time-consuming activities, in certain countries this task was seen as much more time-consuming — for example, in Sweden and Canada.

- Sweden was seen to be at the vanguard of IT utilization among respondent countries, with above-average adoption of technologies such as mobile e-mail, company-branded e-mail, customer databases and e-commerce Web sites. The U.K. and Russia also scored highly, with China and France showing less adoption of technologies.

- The U.S. and France are the countries where small businesses are most likely not to have any IT, both at 9 percent. Only 3 percent of Russian small businesses have no IT.

- Most of the time, IT support is provided by either the respondent or by someone within the organization, either a professional or an amateur. Occasionally, small companies will recognize that they need to invest in professional IT support; as suggested earlier, this is particularly so in Australia, where 34 percent of respondents used an external IT service and support company.

- The local or national retailer of IT support is very important in this context, as is the online merchant. Around 89 percent of the respondent organizations use one of these three sources. While the British and French respondents use online more than most, Australian and Japanese organizations seem to prefer the local IT provider.

- Overall, 65 percent of respondents said either “yes” or “maybe” when asked if they would consider using a hosting service.

- About 47 percent of small businesses in total said their business would be better if they had more IT resources. Russian (72 percent) and Chinese (83 percent) small businesses felt most strongly about this, suggesting that small businesses in those countries felt IT provided a competitive enablement and advantage.

- About 58 percent of small businesses revealed they use IT skills in-house, while 63 percent (in another question) said they believed larger enterprises with more IT resources gain a competitive advantage. Swedish small businesses were most likely (23 percent) to employ an IT specialist, while many Canadian (20 percent) small businesses also employed an IT specialist. About 34 percent of Australian small businesses used outside IT services and support, much more than any other country.

More here.

So, what’s a direct marketing blog doing talking about coffee? Well, it was on my mind today and the more I browsed around, the more coffee news I came up with, and felt the compulsion to share with you.

You’ve probably all heard about Starbucks’ offer to give everyone who votes today a cup of joe. For free. Without requiring any proof of voting. I love that! We’ve been faced with so much depressing economic news (and don’t get me started about the overkill on the election coverage…), that news about getting anything for free, especially one of my favorite things, puts a grin on my face. Kudos for Starbucks for being good to their customers and encouraging us all to vote. Oh, and kudos to them for garnering all of this good press and building customer good-will at the same time.

While I’m on the topic of Starbucks, check out this DM News article about their launch of a new loyalty program. If you spend more than $5/week at Starbucks, you will definitely find value in this card, even though it’s not free. You know my take on this, as a database marketer–I’m drooling over the opportunities to mine the customer data and figure out new ways to sell more things and grow customer loyalty.

Here’s an overview of the program, straight from the article:

The new Gold program, which goes into wide release on November 4, offers a 10% discount on most in-store purchases. Gold membership costs $25 annually and offers its own card, which users are encouraged to register for additional benefits such as complimentary beverages on their birthdays. Starbucks Card Rewards, the program that launched earlier this year, provides members with free drink customizations and WiFi hours with the use of a pre-loaded Starbucks card.

And, if that wasn’t enough coffee news, take a look at this item (also from DM News) that talks about Caribou Coffee’s launch of a mobile marketing campaign. I can see how this channel could be ideal for retailers like Caribou–catch your demographic (in this case, they wanted to boost sales to 18-34 year olds) when they’re out and about and shoot them a valuable coupon ($1 off a large drink). Nice application of mobile marketing, wouldn’t you agree?

So, there you have it, an update on direct marketing of coffee–with some loyalty ideas thrown in at no extra charge!

Gotta go–need to drink my Venti!

It’s Monday, and that means it’s time for a direct marketing case study. This one comes to us jointly from Acxiom and Alltel Wireless. (Check out this link for a podcast on same topic, plus the opportunity to sign up for the full case study).

Customer Lifecycle Management

When Alltel Wireless engaged Acxiom to improve the precision, relevance and sophistication of its direct marketing communications, the company’s siloed sources of customer data and limited prospecting data were restricting their abilities to engage with customers and prospects. Acxiom worked closely with the Alltel Wireless team to deliver a set of solutions that anchored the entire campaign process. Acxiom combined its data products and customer intelligence with Alltel Wireless customer data and prospect list for targeted segmentation based on actual customer behavior and real household composites.

The Opportunity
Alltel Wireless wanted to increase customer acquisitions, improve retention and grow customer revenue with more targeted, relevant communications.

The Solution
Acxiom’s marketing database solution assisted in driving two top objectives:

• New customer growth
• Reduction in customer churn

The Results
265% increase in incremental customer postpaid additions tied to direct marketing efforts. “My Circle” campaign gross take rates exceeded 6% from existing customers. Direct customer communications have increased 285%.

Wow–pretty great results! Truly illustrates the power of a database.

We are currently working on a project predicting the evolution of the “Next Web” ( let no one call it Web 3.0 ! ) over the next 5 years or so, and its been quite fun doing a “Delphi Literature Search” ie looking at what has been prognosticated, and aggregating it. Anyway, one of the better (by better I mean lucid, reasoned and rational ) set of predictions has been by McKinsey, with 8 trends to watch. Here is a summary:

1. Distributing cocreation

The Internet and related technologies give companies radical new ways to harvest the talents of innovators working outside corporate boundaries. Today, in the high-technology, consumer product, and automotive sectors, among others, companies routinely involve customers, suppliers, small specialist businesses, and independent contractors in the creation of new products. Outsiders offer insights that help shape product development, but companies typically control the innovation process. Technology now allows companies to delegate substantial control to outsiders—cocreation—in essence by outsourcing innovation to business partners that work together in networks. By distributing innovation through the value chain, companies may reduce their costs and usher new products to market faster by eliminating the bottlenecks that come with total control.

2. Using consumers as innovators

Consumers also cocreate with companies; the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, for instance, could be viewed as a service or product created by its distributed customers. But the differences between the way companies cocreate with partners, on the one hand, and with customers, on the other, are so marked that the consumer side is really a separate trend. These differences include the nature and range of the interactions, the economics of making them work, and the management challenges associated with them.

3. Tapping into a world of talent

As more and more sophisticated work takes place interactively online and new collaboration and communications tools emerge, companies can outsource increasingly specialized aspects of their work and still maintain organizational coherence. Much as technology permits them to decentralize innovation through networks or customers, it also allows them to parcel out more work to specialists, free agents, and talent networks.

4. Extracting more value from interactions

Companies have been automating or offshoring an increasing proportion of their production and manufacturing (transformational) activities and their clerical or simple rule-based (transactional) activities. As a result, a growing proportion of the labor force in developed economies engages primarily in work that involves negotiations and conversations, knowledge, judgment, and ad hoc collaboration—tacit interactions, as we call them. By 2015 we expect employment in jobs primarily involving such interactions to account for about 44 percent of total US employment, up from 40 percent today. Europe and Japan will experience similar changes in the composition of their workforces.

5. Expanding the frontiers of automation

Companies, governments, and other organizations have put in place systems to automate tasks and processes: forecasting and supply chain technologies; systems for enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and HR; product and customer databases; and Web sites. Now these systems are becoming interconnected through common standards for exchanging data and representing business processes in bits and bytes. What’s more, this information can be combined in new ways to automate an increasing array of broader activities, from inventory management to customer service.

6. Unbundling production from delivery

Technology helps companies to utilize fixed assets more efficiently by disaggregating monolithic systems into reusable components, measuring and metering the use of each, and billing for that use in ever-smaller increments cost effectively. Information and communications technologies handle the tracking and metering critical to the new models and make it possible to have effective allocation and capacity-planning systems.

7. Putting more science into management

Just as the Internet and productivity tools extend the reach of and provide leverage to desk-based workers, technology is helping managers exploit ever-greater amounts of data to make smarter decisions and develop the insights that create competitive advantages and new business models. From “ideagoras” (eBay-like marketplaces for ideas) to predictive markets to performance-management approaches, ubiquitous standards-based technologies promote aggregation, processing, and decision making based on the use of growing pools of rich data.

8. Making businesses from information

Accumulated pools of data captured in a number of systems within large organizations or pulled together from many points of origin on the Web are the raw material for new information-based business opportunities.

Interesting thoughts – I find the “Web 2.0″ community spends a disproportionate amount of its attention on 1,2,3 and 6 – the “presentation” layer stuff – but we have done quite a lot of work on areas 4,5 and 7 in the last year and predict that, although less sexy, this is where as much, if not more, of the future value lies. (It also makes Google’s strategy as a Point 8 business much clearer)

When implemented properly, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software can be best ever application to coordinate all your business processes and to integrate all your business systems. Here are some tips for writing your business success story with your CRM software.

• Clear goals: Implementing CRM without clear goals is the most common CRM mistake. Is your primary goal is customer service or resource management or contact management or employee management, well you have to decide it clearly.
• Customization: Not do it solely because others are doing it. Customize your CRM software tools, modules, dashboard and reports so that they best suit your company.
• Reaching to your customers: identify from where your customers are coming and make sure that source is reachable and profitable.
• Determining the data you want to have: different companies view and analyze their customers in different way. So make sure that you include all key customer data that you need.
• Monitoring and reporting: Create a plan on it, regarding how much time you can spend for this purpose and how much analyzable and applicable the reports are.
• Communicate effectively: communication with customers and employees vital.