Do you think you can name some of the top ten words used in new taglines? I got five of 10.

The most commonly used words or concepts (alphabetically):

1. believe
2. far/further
3. future
4. imagine/see
5. innovate/innovation
6. more
7. new
8. save/savings
9. together
10. you

This info would be more interesting with some historical perspective. For example, I would like to know if numbers eight and 10 have recently cracked the top 10, or are they perennial favorites.

Paola Norambuena, Interbrand’s head of Verbal Identity (ed. yes, that’s really his title), says that keeping on top of commonly used taglines is important for two reasons:

• First, it can highlight how companies are responding to shifts in the market
• Second, it highlights what to avoid. Using only popular words creates lack of distinctiveness

Norambuena notes that different words aren’t enough to create distinctiveness. The same idea can be expressed in dozens of ways. Take, for example, Target’s “Expect More. Pay Less.” It feels very similar to Wal-Mart’s “Save Money. Live Better” and even similar to Home Depot’s “More Saving. More Doing.” In the current economy, we know consumers are looking for ways to save, but what in the taglines truly drives differentiation?

Keep in mind that brand identity and equity consists of much more than a tagline. That’s why I wonder if these monster brands worry much about overlapping taglines/messages. They are simply tweaking and reinforcing what they’ve already come to stand for in the mind of the consumer. And what they’ve come to stand for is the sum total of many types of inputs.

When choosing taglines, most companies explore options along a continuum of “descriptive” to “timeless.”  There are arguments for both, especially if taglines and slogans are to be applied at the corporate, divisional, and product levels. (The only universal rule is to never invite lawyers or accountants to these meetings.) Four51’s current tagline is On-Demand Smart Catalog Technology. This is mostly descriptive. A tagline like “Think Ahead. Stay Ahead” is timeless. In other words, it’s hard to imagine a time when this tagline would clash with the company’s strategy and goals.

Parting thought: remember that the burden of telling your company’s story doesn’t rest solely on the tagline. Don’t try to make it do too much. It can’t. It needs help from the compelling content on your website, the skill and friendliness of your customer-facing employees, and the professionalism of your reps.

SDN – SAP Developer Network – http://sdn.sap.com
BPX – Business Process Expert Community – http://bpx.sap.com
BOC – Business Objects Community – http://boc.sap.com
SAP EcoHub – http://ecohub.sap.com
UAC – University Alliances Community – http://uac.sap.com
SAP TechEd & SAP Tech Tour – http://sapteched.com
SCN – SAP Community Network – http://scn.sap.com

Together, these communities have ~1.7 million members in 200+ countries, with forums, wikis, blogs, eLearning, downloads, whitepapers and articles, plus 400,000 bi-weekly newsletter subscribers.

Yolton uses an interesting phrase in his response to the question below: richness of relationship. Everyone says relationships matter, and implicit in that statement is that they matter from a financial perspective. He goes on to say that “communities have brought SAP tremendous financial and non-financial benefits.” What is a non-financial benefit? Is it perhaps a financial benefit that just can’t be measured the traditional way?

Q: According to Charlene Li’s Altimeter Group’s recent report that deep brand engagement correlates with financial performance – do you think that’s true? Or is it the reverse? SAP was listed as a brand using best practices for engagement – your engagement is not limited to a few social media experts, but extends across your brand.

A: It’s a chicken and egg question. Are successful companies more engaged in social media because they can be – because they are successful, or are they successful because they are engaged in social media? There is a correlation…we don’t know if there is causality. I can say that being engaged in community and social media has brought SAP tremendous benefits, including product adoption, market penetration, and so on — and also richness of relationship which can translate into customer satisfaction and success – and I would guess that would translate into customer loyalty. I know that these communities have brought SAP tremendous financial and non-financial benefits.

Okay, here we go again….

Just like 10 years ago when Four51 paved the way in e-commerce, we’re now leading the way into the rapidly growing social economy by introducing Four51 FanTools for Facebook. We’ve been working on social media for the better part of a year.  And now we’re excited to unveil Four51 FanTools for Facebook.  Our ultimate vision is total social media and marketing management via support for the most popular social tools.

Here’s what we’re doing…we think these tools will help your business thrive in today’s 24-hour marketing cycle. We’ve reached an age in which instant marketing on Facebook, Twitter, and in the Blogosphere can work seamlessly with more traditional printed and branded communications tools (direct mail, brochures, promo items, etc.).

You now have the ability with the push of a button to post, tweet, update, blog. And with Four51’s widely embraced e-commerce platform you can now synchronize these real-time social media channels with the traditional marketing mix. Online and offline: fast, synchronized, cohesive.

Simply put, Four51 FanTools for Facebook allows brands, their agencies, and their sellers in segments like retail, franchising, distribution, and manufacturing to quickly and simply implement a Facebook Fan page strategy. And in doing so, get a head-start on competitors in building your (or your client’s) dynamic, vital social communities, comprising customers, prospects, partners and other important participants.

Four51 focused its initial launch in the social economy on Facebook for one simple reason: it’s huge. This is a market of 200 million-plus members, growing rapidly week-in and week-out. Facebook is becoming the standard for the social economy. As it strengthens its hold, more and more of your customers and their customers are going to be doing business – buying and selling – in this environment.

Four51 FanTools for Facebook is an excellent fit if you’re a brand, agency or seller wanting to nurture your community online. With it, you can configure your own, and/or your customers’ Facebook fan pages quickly, making offers to targeted prospects based on gender, geography, age, and lifestyle.  Further, now you have excellent ways to create reports showing those accessing offers, accepting them, rating and sharing them.

Central to Four51 FanTools is the DealStream, a configurable, dynamic portal platform consisting of four distinct yet integrated programs:

• The Offer Portal, supporting unlimited offers via coupons, gift cards, mobile SMS messaging
• The Dealer & Location Portal, allowing fans to quickly find nearby locations
• The Brand Central Portal, an online source of branded video communications
• The Brand Store Portal, featuring immediate “buy-now” e-commerce integration via Four51 ecommerce technology

There are a number of benefits. For example, Four51 FanTools for Facebook lets you:

• Implement a social commerce strategy with minimal investment risk
• Manage the presentation of more dynamic brand content as a Facebook “Application”
• Control your social interactions
• Measure your campaign and communications effectiveness

Best of all, you now can seamlessly coordinate the emerging social media environment with traditional offline activities, ensuring that messaging and materials in both environments are in synch and delivering ROI.

As you know, we’re in an age where people and communities are exerting more and more influence over the brands they prefer. I learned this from my four kids who are in their teens and early 20s. Maybe you have too.

Say “so-long” to the brand manager, the agency, the distributor, the manufacturer mired in long planning cycles, extended production runs, dead-on-arrival messaging and repetitive static campaigns. That approach is so 24 hours ago!  Today’s the day to plan how you need to message and market and sell tomorrow, based on what the world is tweeting or posting about you right now.  And tomorrow’s the day to start planning for the day after.

Welcome to the 24-hour marketing cycle.  Welcome to Four51 FanTools for Facebook.

Drop me a line if you want to learn more and see a demo.

Thanks
–tim
tmorin@four51.com

PS Look for Four51 FanTools updates on Four51’s Facebook Fan Page.

Sorry for the cheap shot, Jeff. It was just too easy. Jeff has been a friend of Four51 for many years, so we’re hoping there’s enough equity there to compensate for a good-natured poke in the ribs.

The employee guidelines are a must-read if you’ve been wondering how to empower your employees while still sleeping at night.

——————————————–

Dear Friend,

Social media has amazing potential to help businesses grow. I can say that because it has done alot for Kodak.
As we continue to explore social media’s business potential, we would like to share with you our lessons learned thus far.

We have created this engaging and thought-provoking guide illustrating ways to engage in two-way conversations with
customers via this growing medium.

In this guide you will find:

• Brief description of the social media landscape
• Myths about social media
• 10 Social Media Tips from Kodak’s Chief Blogger
• Top 10 list for Twitter usage
• How to get started in social media
• Kodak social media activation examples
• Troubleshooting
• Social media guidelines used for our employees

This guide is available electronically at: http//www.kodak.com/go/followus or, you may request printed copies at: mailto:gcgsitelet@kodak.com

We hope that you find the information contained in this guide useful as you consider your social media plan.
If you want to grow your brand, strengthen your connection between you and your customer and be aware of what people really think about your company, it is well worth the time invested.

Thanks for letting me reach out to you, and if there is anything Kodak can do, please let me know!

Sincerely,

Jeff Hayzlett

First, the move to POD is gaining strength. Digital continues to replace offset. [ed. granted, this one isn't very controversial]

Second, an aging sales force is largely complacent, and resists introducing new technologies to customers. Result: penetration stalls, accounts become vulnerable.

Third, distributors risk getting blind-sided by these developments: first, equipment sellers are successfully placing small color devices into buyer accounts — the machine is installed with a 5-year lease before the distributor knows what’s going on. Like getting nibbled to death by ducks. No single duck hurts a lot, but the cumulative effect is devastating. Second, buyers are finding self-serve, online options for printing more attractive every day.

Is it dangerous to put this kind of feedback on our own blog? Once upon a time I would have said Yes. But not now. The Web has changed everything, especially now that The People control the content. Tools that allow us to communicate and collaborate so thoroughly pretty much demand transparency in order to provide real value. Couldn’t this customer simply share his or her opinions on his own blog or a forum if he wanted to? And is it really a big secret that on some days, some customers aren’t thrilled with our support processes?

Jason has answered the question and been thoroughly helpful.

…For the record, yes I am aware of your technical support processes and your discussion forum. I have, and will, avail myself of those processes when an appropriate technical problem or question is at issue. That isn’t the case here.

What I can’t seem to get you or your sales people to understand is that it is not a technical problem I am having based on my lack of understanding of your products/services. This is a technical LIMITATION of your system. As such, tech support and customer forums don’t seem to me to be the appropriate venues for discussing this issue. It is a bigger issue than that.

I was hoping for a more interactive dialog with a higher-level technical person in which I could present this as a problem and find out where Four51 is going with any plans to improve your service. To me, such a discussion seems mutually beneficial. I didn’t realize it would be such a big deal to request a one-time, 10 minute discussion after having been a Four51 customer for a number of years now, and considering the large amount of business we COULD be sending your way.

Despite the availability of your support process, forum, webinars, and roundtable discussions at various conferences (all venues in which YOU strictly control the process), I, as your customer, was foolishly looking for a more personal touch. I will not make such a mistake again.

This customer makes a number of points across several different topics, and I think some of them are quite valid. There is one in particular that I want to focus on:  the sense of entitlement to bypass Four51’s support process to have a (presumably) quick phone call with a higher-level technical person (a developer, in this case). In my opinion, underlying this request is the statement near the end that speaks of “looking for a more personal touch.”

More on that in a moment. First I want to describe our Tech Support philosophy and the building blocks of the process itself. Four51 decided to make technology a cornerstone of how it provides support. That isn’t the same as removing people. As we learned at the psda’s Spring Technology Conference: Technology will never replace people. People who use technology will replace people who don’t.

First, we like to prevent tech support cases if possible. Wouldn’t it be nice if you never needed to contact support with basic How To questions? We would be lonely, but customers would be delighted. To that end, Four51 offers a comprehensive activation program that includes 2 hours of introductory training. In addition, a range of beginner and advanced classes are offered online and in a classroom setting. And all customers are encouraged to participate in our beta release testing cycles. That’s a great way to keep current and influence what we’re working on.

But let’s face it, everyone needs Tech Support at some point. Could be you’re taking the software into uncharted waters, could be you got an error message. Stuff happens. The front-line, if you will, consists of outbound communications and self-service options:  the 300-member forum, the 300+ articles in the knowledgebase, Lunch ‘N’ Learn webcasts, University Four51, micro-blogging, weekly Tips & Tricks emails, the wiki, and to some extent this blog.

Next in line is the case management system, or ticketing system, a component of Four51’s ERP system. From the customer’s perspective, using the ticketing system amounts to exchanging emails with Tech Support personnel. We also use the phone to provide support, because some situations simply require real-time voice dialogue. (The phone has significant downsides as a support tool, but it is necessary in some cases.)

Woven into this apparatus is a Service Level Agreement: we will respond to every case within 24 hours. Often we’re able to close routine cases, let alone respond to them, within an hour. There are also escalation processes based on the nature and complexity of the issue and quality of service:

• Technical Path: Tech Support -> Level II: Senior Testing, Integration, Architecture and Business Analysis Resources -> Level III: Senior R&D Resources -> CTO.
• Complaint Resolution Path: Tech Support -> VP Customer Service -> CEO.

Now let’s talk about trade-offs. What customers get with this technology-centric approach:

• Speed. Assuming they’re complete and detailed, when you use self-service tools you are essentially dictating how fast your question will be answered by removing our response time from the equation.
• Speed II. Submitting a case electronically means your question was routed to the right set of experts at the speed of light. There is no voice mail hell, there is no vacation black hole, and there’s no waiting for your question to get from the wrong person to the right person.
• Convenience. Access anytime from anywhere there’s a browser and an Internet connection.
• Accuracy. Knowledgebase articles are peer-reviewed and updated frequently. All users get the same thoroughly-tested answer every time.
• Accuracy II. The first-response Support Professionals working cases at Four51 are seasoned experts, not entry-level kids reading from a script.
• Influence. Cases automatically feed our Product Lifecycle Management system, where they can be counted and dissected in order to prioritize fixes and determine future functionality requirements.
• Audit Trail. All parties have a complete log of all interactions when the case management system is used.
• Predictability and Efficiency. Customers quickly learn how to work with us — all of us — and what to expect; new customer employees and new Four51 employees can be “raised the right way the first time”.
• Lower cost. Technology-enabled service solutions are far more scalable than traditional labor-intensive help desks. This gives Four51 the flexibility to put more resources into features, testing, infrastructure, and keeping overall costs down.

What customers don’t get:

• Coziness and warmth. Self-service options and email can seem impersonal. We understand that. This is one advantage that the phone has, and it’s one reason Four51 regularly attends industry events. But when it comes to Support — remember that the speed and quality of our Support often affects our customers’ ability to make their customers happy — we believe you would rather have speed and accuracy than a new best friend.
• Familiarity. Print services providers and technology companies tend to use different methods for providing customer support. This can cause friction.
• The chance to mandate that we skip steps. Processes can feel rigid and legalistic, especially when we’re convinced that we should be able to skip steps.

I think the e-mailer above was looking for 1) warmth; and 2) a free pass to skip ahead in the escalation process because he perceived his question to be beyond the grasp of Four51’s Tech Support team. It turns out that his question didn’t require escalation. But the fact remains that we dug in and enforced elements of a process: submit a case to initiate dialogue with Support, direct access to senior R&D resources is based on a defined escalation procedure. (It’s worth mentioning that phone conversations did take place per the Complaint Resolution process noted above.)

This technology-centric approach has worked well for us. We’ve achieved our cost and quality goals, and the market accepts it. But it certainly comes with trade-offs, and not everyone in every case is happy with the trade-offs. I’m sure it’s not perfect, and it never will be. We welcome input.

How can you create, produce, market, sell and get paid for your
product or service if you’re feeling ashamed? You can’t. You have to
be shame-less.  Not arrogant.  But confident of your gifts and eager
to share them with others.

If I had one wish in the world it would be to eliminate shame.  I
think that feeling holds massive amounts of great thinking by all
humans in check and feeds fear.

Successful entrepreneurs, leaders, scientists, cops, engineers,
salespeople, public servants, actors, GIs, artists, teachers,
marketers, chefs, pilots, clergy,  to name a handful, are able to
create great works large and small because they all have two things in
common. They have gifts. And they are shameless about sharing them
with the world.

-tim morin

tmorin@four51.com

Yikes, I hope he can call on You-Know-Who for a miracle or two. Ask him about how he satisfies the profit motive while sporting a Roman collar and this Jesuit will tell you simply: “No Margin. No Mission.”

So he has the same issues less sublime folk like me (and maybe you too) address every day, only inverted. Out here in the secular world our problem is: “No mission. No Margin.”

Why do you suppose so many business people can state within a tenth-of-a-percent their latest profit margin, and yet they can’t come within a country mile of finding a clear, compelling mission consistently communicated by their company? Not having a mission during The Great Recession seems like a rocky road to no margin.

Ask the Jesuit priest about his publishing company’s mission, and he’ll tell you: “Helping souls.” The Jesuits have been around for 500 years, so I suspect their mission will lead to continued margin, even though their publishing business is in an industry that’s upside-down right now for a lot of historic (maybe even biblical) reasons.

Here at Four51 our mission is: “Help businesses market and sell more while spending less.” Okay, so it’s slightly less ambitious than the Jesuits. But, for now, it’s working. We’ve been fortunate to produce margin because of our mission in a really tough economy. We’ll wait to claim complete success in another 490 years or so.

How much time are you thinking about your margin? How much time are you thinking about your mission? Here’s to swapping success stories of Mission and Margin in the 26^th century.

-tim morin

tmorin@four51.com

If you haven’t read it, you should. And if you did read “GOOD TO GREAT”, it may be time for a refresh.

In either case, the latest installment is really well done. Enjoy!

-tim morin

tmorin@four51.com

Here’s one that is delightful because the people who created it were tuned to the voice of their customer and experience of a fellow human.

You may have been this human being if you just spent 12 hours wide-awake on a long-haul overseas flight from somewhere like Minneapolis to Tokyo scrunched into seat 64A in the tail of a stuffed 747-400 who sleepwalked on arrival to an airline lounge to see someone somewhere in this wonderful world had thoughtfully and deeply reflected on who you are at that exact moment in the universe within the arc of all time and responded with passion to quench, not world thirst, but something way more important, that being your thirst right there, right then.

If Four51 were a beer machine we’d work really hard to be what you see here:

Here’s to humans listening to humans.

-tim morin

tmorin@four51.com

Take for example our grand announcement last year featuring this headline: NO COST SAP SOFTWARE. We invented this scheme in which suppliers would pay us for the orders they received from distributors using our system and we would rebate our distributors in such a way that they’d get NO COST SAP software. We called it “Software for Commerce”. And we thought it was genius in action.

Wow, were we wrong.

Our community sized this idea up in, like, half-a-minute. Then it measured us for a corporate dunce cap. Naturally, we tried our best to explain, position, cajole, even beg customers and prospects to see it our way.

Then our toaster popped up when some guy in the community simply told us: “You know, I don’t want free software, even if it is from Four51 and SAP. I just want to buy it like a normal business buys software.”

Here’s the genius of that guy, a voice in the community:

• He runs a normal business
• He accepts complexity in the process of switching to a better accounting / ERP system, not in the process of orders between his customers and suppliers.

So, thanks to the voice of our community, here’s what we learned: Dump Software for Commerce onto the ash-heap of history (we did). And let ‘em buy software like normal companies (they are).

Hopefully print distributors never see a scheme like this one again.

-tim

tmorin@four51.com

1. Brand and product line extensions
2. Slamming the competition

Wells Fargo is well known in the financial services industry. Not so much in the construction materials industry…so a Wells Fargo line of sheetrock or power tools feels like a stretch. Why exactly does it feel like a stretch? Hold that question.

Just last week I heard a radio spot for Cambria Mortgage Service. Hmmmmmm. The quartz counter-top dudes? That Cambria? I wondered. Indeed, it was that Cambria. Seems like a stretch. A disconnect, even. And the reason is that brand extensions by definition are based on transferring credibility. Your brand is (hopefully) credited/associated with expertise in some product or service category. In a brand extension strategy, you are asking your target audience to believe that your skill in X will transfer to Y. Your fanatical followers will believe you because they believe everything you say. But what about everyone else? What happens when you take that story beyond the 3 F’s: fools, friends and family?

Back to that thought I asked you to hold: a major factor in launching and growing a successful brand extension is the distance between X and Y. Banking and sheetrock seem rather distant to me. So do quartz counter-tops and mortgages. In contrast, the Starbucks Barista Aroma Solo™ Drip Brewing Machine makes sense to me. In fact, line extensions are often much easier to pull off than a full-scale brand extension because the leap you’re asking your target to make is much smaller.

I once did some work on a Kraft Velveeta line extension: Mexican flavored Velveeta. This extension was, as I recall, not particularly successful. (I know you’re shocked, because it certainly sounds de-lish.) But in this case the downfall was taste, not lack of credibility. Trial was strong; repeat was not.

So I think the Cambria folks will be challenged to transfer any polish from the quartz biz to the banking biz. They might succeed anyway. I suspect there’s a cross-sell idea in play somehow.

In this same radio spot, the folks at Cambria told me that they aren’t like those fly-by-night mortgage companies that suck your blood and make you read and cause you all kinds of grief etc etc. This falls short of a direct attack on a specific competitor, but it is a good example of what I call “knocking the category,” and it’s a dubious selling tactic. You may counter that it’s knocking only the dirty, slimy segment of the category. Fair enough, but why bring it up at all?

While the idea quartz miners deciding to originate loans strikes me as odd, it does not strike me as prima facie dodgy or questionable. After all, the quartz side of the business is well established. Why plant the seed? Furthermore, the sponsor of the ad doesn’t really have the right to tell me they aren’t dirty like those other guys. It’s OK to say you’re clean, but saying you’re not dirty in a category where many others are has a hollow ring to it.

• People who are focused on your positioning and your brand behavior in every expression possible in today’s marketplace.  This touches and lives through everything.  Your people.  Your products.  Your language.  Go to an Apple Store.  You’ll see this alive there.

• People who collectively comprise the voice of the customer, not by surveys, focus groups and remote audience testing, but by intimately walking the specific journeys of your customers every day and knowing first-hand, on the ground, what is delightful and challenging to them.

• People who collectively comprise the voice of the community.   Community organizers don’t get a lot of credit in the business world.  Please don’t think like this.  The best case study right now on why your business should think like a community organizer was recently elected U.S. president.

• People who are sales docents.  That’s right, docents.  Not hunters, or gatherers, or farmers.  But people who can guide your customers and prospects toward our magnificent world as it is emerging.  Docent derives from Latin, meaning “to teach.”  If you get permission to be the teacher and guide from a community of believers, you will win.

Here’s a quick example of our Four51 SAP integrated accounting product:  we are positioning the best real-time business management platform on the market today.  It’ll be month-end before you get important data with our competitors’ systems.  Imagine doing a Google search and waiting until the 30th or 31st of the month to get your results.  Four51 SAP provides important data you need, right here, right now.

Branding ourselves closely with SAP is also vital to our world-class technology promise.  SAP is the most successful business software company on the planet today because of its rich technology.  Our competitors may question this claim. If so, we say call the Germans and any of their 75,000+ business customers where they will find the claim is well-grounded.

We spend a lot of time daily with each of our customers in their operations, knowing first-hand their interests and their challenges.  And they’ve been just as close to us in designing and developing our product.  In fact, our product is truly designed by a community of print distributors for print distributors.

Finally, we made a decision that doesn’t fit with a new product launch:  we stopped selling.  And now we have hundreds of people lining up to use our product.  Sometimes people ask us what’s going on with SAP and Four51.  Sometimes we ask people if they’d like to get an update about what our community is up to.  In either case, when people are curious, we simply give them a tour.

So, as it is with good art, when someone likes what you show, they come back for another look.  And they talk to others about the experiences that moved them.  This works well when we serve as guides and allow the product, i.e. the art, and a community of believers to speak for themselves.

-tim

tmorin@four51.com

We weren’t expecting anything fancy.  Mrs. Morin had a simple salad.  I ordered spaghetti and meatballs.
But something didn’t seem right when, just as our entrees arrived, the apparent house rock band over in the corner, kicked into “Love Me Two Times / Baby Please Don’t Go” by Jim Morrison and The Doors. I was expecting lively mediterranean ambience because its website said it offered “Italian classics and imaginative dishes with the most affordable and adventurous international wine list anywhere.” Instead, I got rock-and-roll meatballs. What a weird place, and the people were strange. If Michael Scott (who used to run THE OFFICE at Dunder Mifflin) ran a restaurant, this would be the kind of outfit he’d have. This is a place where on-brand behavior was not on good behavior. And it left me wondering:  Why is it so hard for a business to maintain good, on-brand behavior?

One simple answer is that most businesses don’t know what position they want to hold in the market and what they really want their brand(s) to mean. This is a tough thing for most businesses to do really well.  Ask yourself and nine colleagues:  “What’s our market positioning and the meaning of our brand?”  If you get 10 different answers, that’s a big problem for your business. Even more difficult is having a well-articulated positioning and brand, and making sure your business is always on good brand behavior.

At Four51, we believe our positioning and brand hold a place in the market for really, really good technology. Our SMART CATALOGS help tens of thousands of businesses, many of them very large, and millions of users operate more efficiently. Our positioning and brand promise drove our decision to invest millions of dollars into integrating SAP’s accounting system with the Four51 product. This kept us on track even when we faced challenges early on. The market is a wise and perceptive place. It recognizes good, on-brand behavior. And, fortunately, it is giving Four51 credit for having the best and most complete e-commerce business management platform available.

Being aware of your brand behavior may be the most important thing you can do for your business, no matter what role you have at your company.  Making sure your brand is always on good behavior is priceless. The alternative could turn you into a place known for rock-and-roll meatballs. Don’t let your brand become just another lost angel. Drop a line with your thoughts about your positioning and brand, if you have a minute.

-tim
tmorin@four51.com

I’m going to use my last ounce of professionalism — there wasn’t much there to start with, mind you — to disguise the company names.

1.
I found your company on the internet and I wanted to take a moment of your time and introduce you to C_______. We are a 25 year old manufacturing facility for CD’s and DVD’s. We provide complete manufacturing services from pre-mastering analysis, glass mastering, molding, silk-screening, offset printing, packaging, and fulfillment. If you want to know more about our company please visit our website at www.____.com and if you have an upcoming project please drop me a line at any of the numbers below and I will be happy to discuss it with you and provide you competitive costing.

Sincerely, X

Jim’s commentary: We, we, we, we…product, skill, product, skill…25 years and low price.

Wow.

How about starting with how you can help me solve my problems rather than what you’re capable of doing? And you want me to visit your site? Why? And I should remember to drop you a line when I recognize that I need the stuff you know how to do…the stuff so drenched in jargon that I couldn’t understand it? Can I get you a fresh cup of coffee, too?

2.
Just touching base to see what sort of projects you may have going on that we can bid you out on…ECONOMY BUSTER Specials:

1,000 Full Build CD’s …CALL!!! prices so low they embarrass our competitors
1,000 Full Build DVD5’s… CALL!!! prices so low they embarrass our competitors

Ask about our USB flash drive prices…

All sorts of board packaging…wallets ,sleeves, digipaks…lowest prices out there

Tape to disk transfers, authoring, printing, packaging…call and ask us for a quote on anything…Best pricing in the business right now…fastest turn times…

I______ is committed to providing the absolute best customer service to all past, present and prospective customers. Again, Please advise if you currently need a bid on anything..

We’d like to thank you for choosing us as your replicator/duplicator…

Thanks, Y

Jim’s commentary: Heavy doses of product and price, price, price. Not to mention some grammar that tied me in a knot.

Please…if I’m a prospect, solve a problem for me. If I’m a current customer, talk to me like I’m a current customer. Prices that will embarrass the competition??!! Do you want a relationship based on my belief that you’re a commodity?

Great customer service is expected. It’s table stakes. In contrast, “faster turn times” comes dangerously close to being relevant to me, but it was left hanging. Naked. “Jim, in your business fast turn times are critical because…” That’s the email that wasn’t written, the message that wasn’t delivered. So I’m left with PRICE as the key take-away. (By the way, is there a worse opening than Just touching base? I can’t think of a stronger signal that everything to follow is dull and of no real consequence.)

And as we saw in the first email, I have the privilege of advising him when I need what he can do.

The rant is over. Please don’t be lazy. Forget your skills and study my problems. Remember that I’m trading money for a solution to my troubles, not your ability to do something cool at an embarrassingly low price. You need to connect the dots that lead from my problems to your offerings. Be inspired, then do something inspiring.

Every day, Fred records his lessons using a digital smart board and a simple web-cam device, which he uses to upload lessons to the web.  Every night, his students log in to view his lesson.  Then, they show up the next day and spend the whole hour in class doing homework together based on the previous night’s posting.  Imagine that, teacher and students, all doing math homework together in class. Wow!  That’s different.  That’s probably even brilliant.  It makes me want to go back to school and re-take math class with Fred.

Here’s another place that just came into being:  Read It For (dot) Me.

If you like to stay current on the latest business books but don’t have time to read them, this place is for you.  All it takes is 10 minutes a week and you’ll get a great snapshot of some of the best thought leadership on the market today.

Steve Cunningham is the fellow who started it and he obviously has his pulse on the mismatch between big, best-seller business books and busy business people.  So his response was to do something completely different. He’s making it easy for business people to catch up on the latest big ideas with a thorough multi-media web summary in a few minutes.

As Steve says:  “while you’re sleeping, he’s reading.”  Go look at it.

Ok, one more different idea for you.  This one comes close to crass commercialism but, hey, I offered you a couple of cool ideas up front so hopefully you’ll forgive me. Guess how many people in the print distributor business are going to be doing something really different this year by using Four51’s integrated accounting system, powered by SAP BusinessOne? As of today, the number is in the hundreds.  And that’s the result of only actively marketing this revolutionary product for three months.  By the end of 2009, we think that number will be way into the hundreds based on the interest we are seeing. All this is happened while America and the world were in the midst of an historic economic downturn (don’t get me going on our sense of timing here at Four51.  Being experts at calling a market and when it’s ripe to introduce a product, we’re not).

But that shouldn’t obscure the reason people are interested.  What we’re hearing is simple:  Trying to grow by doing the same thing and same technology won’t cut it. Like Fred the Math Teacher and Steve Cunningham, more and more people believe the time to do something different is when it’s clear their results will change for the better.

Drop me a line if you have any “Different is better” storylines in your world.

-tim
tmorin@four51.com

Broadly speaking, the questions we get can be categorized as follows:

• What can the Four51 system do?
• What resources are available to help me learn?
• How do I sell Four51 to my customers?
• What are others doing?

We’re constantly analyzing the specific questions. Doing this helps us create go-to-market programs, add useful features to the application, measure the success of our new-customer orientation process and prioritize new articles for the knowledgebase.

Starting this week, we’re going to use this analysis in a new way. We’re going to begin publishing a weekly “Did You Know?” info-mail to all of Four51’s Distributor and Supplier customers. These emails will be short, sweet, relevant, and contain links to more detailed information. They will also be archived. What’s more, customers can suggest topics — and there will be a wonderful prize for the customer whose suggestion we cover in a future Did You Know?

The theory is that if one person is asking, there are probably 20 who need the same information but aren’t asking…or don’t know what they don’t know. The goal is to make every last one of our many thousands of customers better, smarter, faster, happier, richer.

Once I was done reading it, I wondered about these questions:

• What will a print distributor’s business look like in 5 – 10 years?
• Is technology from Four51 and our integrated partners like SAP going to be helpful in creating the distributors of the future?
• Who will the distributors of the future be selling to?
• What will the distributors of the future be selling to their customers (that is, what will be their key value proposition)?

You may have other questions. Even better, you may have the answers. Either way, let us know what you think after reading Seth’s latest blog post

-tim
tmorin@four51.com

Just kidding.

I normally say that you are welcome to charge, but I don’t recommend it. Do you charge your customers when you send them a catalog in the mail? Do you charge your customer a portion of your phone/fax/email expense every month so they can send you orders?

You could make the case that you should actually charge customers less if they order online…it’s the most efficient way for you to take an order. Plus, there are other ways to recoup your technology costs: you can increase your margin, you can charge a handling fee, or you can simply absorb the costs the same way you do for the other technology that you use.

If it costs you $1,000 to create product templates, create a custom theme and setup the permissions and buying rules on a site, should those costs be passed on to the customer? If you can generate a couple of thousand dollars per month in online orders, you can easily absorb those setup costs over the course of the first year.

Plus, once you get customers ordering online, you may even be able to charge them more for the products, increase your margins and handle increased order volume without hiring additional customer support resources. So how can you get your customers to pay more for the product they order online? More on that next time…

Bill

This is a guy who sells more business management software to businesses large and small around the world than anyone else.  So he should have a pretty good handle on major business trends. What he told Charlie Rose is really interesting and notable for print and indirect products distributors.  (At least we think so, since SAP Four51 is being installed in distributors’ businesses today.)
Here is Apotheker’s take on where businesses like yours and ours are heading :

• “I believe business is going to be fundamentally different 5 years from now.”
• “I think you will see more and more companies working in networks.  Not just because of the current crisis;there was an underlying trend happening already.  Now I believe the current crisis will accelerate it.”
• “They may be loosely coupled networks or tightly integrated networks but they will be networks.”
• “You will see more and more of these networks coming together.  They need interactivity among themselves.”
• “And in order to be in such a network, what do you need?  You need insight into your network and, of course, outside your network.  And you need business processes that go (across) the entire network because that network needs to function as one virtual entity.”
• “That is going to be a fundamental shift in the way people do business.  And it requires collaboration among human beings and it requires collaboration among businesses.  And you need to open up the network so that everyone can cooperate with everyone.”
• “That is going to require a completely different IT environment.”

80,000 businesses run SAP business software today.  In the next year or so, that number will be well over 100,000.

What you are seeing is the formation of a massive business network.  And this network, as a virtual entity, buys a lot of print, promotional items, office products and other types of indirect goods every year. Is this kind of business network interesting to you?  Do you agree with Apotheker that it will require you to operate a completely different IT environment?   How well will your business software match up with your customers’ networks in 5 years?

Let me know what you think.

Tim

tmorin@four51.com

Neither Lynn Anderson nor I ever promised you a rose garden. What does that have to do with anything, you might ask. It reminds me of debates about technology upgrades. When encouraged to upgrade to the latest version of something, we (me included) are at times tempted to push back and say: I don’t want to upgrade. What I have works fine. The new version will undoubtedly have stability issues. And all my employees are trained on the current version, and now you’re setting us back. And so on. Ad nauseum.

Well, no one ever promised that your interface would remain the same forever. DOS gave way to Windows. Progress isn’t without setbacks, but if you choose technology partners wisely, real progress over time is what you’ll get. That’s what you were promised. Protecting your business data, not the interface. Taking advantage of new features means new learning.

So, here is something to keep in mind when debating about upgrading to Pageflex 6. The Four51 application support team has upgraded to Pageflex 6 on all our machines. This means that if you require us to open a product we will not be able to upload any changes that we make to it unless you are also using Pageflex 6. Once a project has been saved in Pageflex 6 you will not be able to open it again in an older version.

Help support help you by upgrading. Plus Pageflex 6 has a lot of cool new features!  Check out a recording of the demo I gave on September 25th on the knowledgebase to learn more about it.

Who is your friend? “Add” is your friend!

Thank you.

-Mike & Jim, with all due respect to Lynn

Essentially, fonts are like any other software. To be able to use the software, we are required to own a license to have that font installed on our computers. I have been asked whether it is possible for a customer to give us some temporary “right” to use the font on our servers while a product is being rendered in PageFlex. Again, this is not possible, since the font is required to be installed on our equipment, and there is no notion of a temporary software loan to Four51.

Some people have questioned me whether anyone ever checks. Well, aside from the legality issues around software licensing, and being a good corporate citizen, the answer is actually yes, they do sometimes check. In my previous job at a large national organization, we were subjected to an Adobe audit, which was thorough and comprehensive. Software licensing rules allow a vendor to conduct such audits. After all, if a designer spent time, money and resources to create a product, in this case a font, they should be fairly compensated for the use of that product. Given the publicity of piracy in the music industry, it seems clear cut today that if a work of art is copyrighted, then everyone who obtains a copy thereof should pay for it.

I spent some time researching font licensing, and would like to close off by referring to two excerpts from industry experts in this field:

Adobe – “When you purchase a font you do not obtain ownership to the font per se. You are actually paying for a license to use the font on a specific number of computers by a specific number of users. What most users do not realize is that when they purchase a license to use font software they cannot freely copy and distribute the font software”. Full text is available at http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/antipiracy/ff_faq.html

AIGA – “Font software may not be given or loaned to anyone who does not have a license to use it. Therefore, misuse or unauthorized copying of a font that belongs to a client or your employer is an infringement of the designer’s rights and could subject you to legal action.” http://www.aiga.org/resources/content/3/5/9/6/documents/aiga_2fonts_07.pdf

Oliver Lederer

Do you ever wonder if there is a process that is used to ensure quality on Four51? Have you ever experienced any issues on a web site you frequent? Do you ever wonder how a web site performs at such a high level of quality? If you answered “Yes” to any of those questions, the term Quality Assurance should come to mind. Each company assures the quality of their product at some level whether that is just a developer who tests his code, or a person or a team of people who are responsible.

At Four51, each person Four51 employs is utilized as a resource to assuring the quality of the Four51 application along with Four51 customers. With that said, Four51 has a dedicated Quality Assurance team that manages the process of assuring quality. With each release that Four51 deploys to the Production environment, the task of testing the entire application and assuring quality increases in complexity. The great thing about the application is that it is so configurable. Within the application, a Four51 seller can accommodate many or all requests from their customers. Four51 is different from many web sites in that it has multiple types of users and many types of uses, which are all accommodated for within one code base.

One necessary tool in any QA professional’s tool box is a location to test changes/updates to an application. Four51 uses a site specifically for this reason, which we call the QA environment and can only be accessed internally by Four51. As Four51 developers make changes to the code and check in their changes for a specific release, the code is deployed to the QA environment at a regular interval. During this phase, the QA team tests the changes along with employing an agile test strategy to assure quality in other areas of the application remains high. The next phase of the process is to “freeze” the code, which means, no more changes are introduced into the code base unless absolutely necessary. The code is stable on the QA environment at this stage and allows the QA team to complete final testing of the application in a controlled environment.

The QA environment is a great tool for the QA team, but to assure the greatest quality of the Four51 application or any web site, it requires a complete team effort from all at Four51 and the customer base.

]]> http://www.insightsfour51.com/?feed=rss2&p=458 0 http://www.insightsfour51.com/?p=458 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/four51_customers/~3/_Ak1q96xmfs/ http://www.insightsfour51.com/?p=474#comments Fri, 24 Oct 2008 22:33:35 +0000 info@four51.com (Four51) http://www.insightsfour51.com/?p=474 Another in a series of blogs live from the Print Solutions show floor!

Despite aching joints, it was a good day. We made it through the inevitable issues with internet connectivity and electricity. Then it was clear sailing. Lots of interest in SAP integration. In fact, we’ve already closed a deal at the show! And Open Network Catalogs have caught the attention of smaller distributors who want to start selling online but don’t want to build products right away. There is a growing sense that online ordering is becoming a requirement, not an option.

Many thanks to customers like Superior, RBO, Dynamic, abgi, Kelley, Prograde, and partners like Ennis and BSI, for stopping by and for being strong advocates of the Four51 solution.

On the competitive front, I did not hear much today about the Bidding Tool that DemandBridge announced. What I did hear was negative. For example, suppliers I talked to aren’t thrilled about funding the development of a product that could drive down their margins.

That’s the news from the psda show in Baltimore.

hyperlabel (http://www.hyperlabel.com), an invisible optical tagging system that unifies product serialization, anti-counterfeiting and brand loyalty. It’s the marriage of — or at least a dating relationship between — print and Web 2.0.

I will blog tomorrow from the show floor.

PS Baltimore is home to a very bad baseball team and a very under-appreciated giant of American literature named HL Mencken. Look him up.

There is excitement brewing in the Four51 Customer base as people anticipate the arrival of Coupon and Gift Card functionality. This functionality will provide a convenient way to offer discounts to buyer users everywhere – both current customers and prospects!

Gift cards are fairly straight forward, right? Include a unique code and poof the person who entered it during checkout gets free money! Coupons on the other hand have a very complex set of options and control settings that allow our sellers to configure each one to meet unique customer requests. Here are some examples:

• 10% off your entire order
• $50.00 towards your next print order
• Free Shipping in December 2008
• Every user in Group A gets 20% off his or her promotional order
• 5% off your first 5 orders

As you can see, there will be tons of configurability options to take advantage of. Be sure to check it out!

Want to increase your margins? Want to leverage technology to increase your order volume without increasing staff? Want to sell more products to existing customers? Want to have your customers stay with you forever? (I know you need to fire customers occasionally, but most of them you want to keep around!) Get all of your customers ordering online now!

In order to get more of your customers ordering more products online, you need to understand the real value of ordering online and you need to be able to articulate that value to your customers. What is the real value of online ordering? The stock answer you see in everyone’s marketing material is save time and money! How boring. What does it really mean? By putting multiple product categories from multiple suppliers in one catalog, you reduce the overhead associated with ordering both for you AND your customer!

In my last post (LINK!!!), I cited a franchise example where my former company increased the product sold from 4 products to 30 products during the first year of online ordering and increased the average margin from 35 to 45 points. These products were previously sourced from several different suppliers and the franchise owners had to place separate orders with all three suppliers. Once the products were all in the same online catalog, the franchise owners reduced their costs by creating one order in one online shopping cart. That led to one purchase order, one invoice and one payment.

I have seen an estimate that for a company to cut a check for payment of an order that costs $57. If you need to go to three different suppliers, create three separate orders, deal with three invoices and cut three checks for payment, that’s $171 just to place orders and pay for products. Reducing the overhead associated with those orders by consolidating orders online is real value.

What if the manager that places the order needs to spend 30 minutes on the phone trying to track down those three orders? Did they ship, where are they, when will they get here? We’ve all had to deal with those calls. What if the manager can simply go online and automatically track their shipments with UPS or FedEx? How much time will that save them over the course of a quarter or a year? There is real value there (for both of you as you don’t have to take this call any longer).

What if the manager needs to interrupt his day to place orders over the phone from 9-5? If they had a system available where they could place orders online after hours, on holidays or whenever their heart desired, they could use their time from 9-5 more effectively. If the manager can get instant notification that their order has been received and gets automatic notification when their order ships, would they gain time during their day? There is real value there.

There is real value to be realized for you AND your customer when you get them to order online.

Bill

In a recent post, Four51 CEO Mark Johnson discussed the question of charging your customers for costs associated with creating a catalog to enable online ordering. In the end, I think it is best to provide the technology solution with no additional financial barrier to getting online. One of the main reasons not to charge a setup fee is that once you get them online, customers have a difficult time switching vendors. Another less obvious reason is that the customer becomes much less price-sensitive and you can actually get them to pay more for product when they order online than when they don’t. I have personally experienced this phenomenon on several occasions.

In a previous life, I set up a program for a franchise system with 30 locations that started with only four products in the catalog at an average margin of 35 points. Within the first year, we had 30 products in the catalog and the average margin was up to 45 points. The customer even agreed to pay a premium of an additional 15 points for a product that I was not the distributor for simply so they could order the product the same way they ordered everything else. The convenience of the online ordering system, the reduced time that the franchise owners spent ordering, the online order tracking and the reporting that was available made the franchise system much less price sensitive than they were before.

All of these things add value to your product/service offering and may allow you to charge more for products that are ordered online. Which brings up the question: What is the real value of online ordering? Stay tuned…

Bill

It seems like whenever Apple announces that a new product is being released and the sample is available, the number of shoppers in our local Apple Store increases. Even though all Apple products can be conveniently ordered online, many people prefer to see and use the latest technology before jumping in to make a purchase. Well, at Four51 we schedule a month long Beta Program prior to every major release to let our customers see and use our latest technology before releasing it in to the live environment.

The Beta Program kicks off with a demonstration of some of the new features that are in the release. After that, the Staging environment is made available to our customers who want to ensure their current processes work and also check out how the new features enhance their usage of the application.  Staging is created by taking a copy of the Production database and then applying the new features on top of that. We do that so our customers can safely test with real world examples without affecting their customers sites.  After the release date the Staging environment is taken offline until the next scheduled Beta Program.

There are many ways the Staging environment can be helpful for you prior to a Release.

S – Support your customers immediately upon release

T – Test existing processes to ensure everything still works

A – Announce the upgrade and scheduled downtime to your customers

G – Get to know the new features without affecting live data

I – Identify issues. They can be repaired easier before the release than after

N – Notify your staff, update documentation and provide training

G – Give a demo to your customers or prospects

So, like we all do when purchasing new technology, I hope you will join me in future Beta Programs to see and use the latest technology on the Staging Environment prior to the big Release night!

Come to training, and I promise you will hear this: “I didn’t realize that I could do that!” And it’s not the newbies who say this. It’s the veterans who have been using the system for a while and have decided to come in for formal training. Do you know what they say next?

“This made the trip worthwhile! Everything else I learn is gravy.” (It’s about value, not cost.)

Four51 is very versatile, and there are 3-4 releases a year crammed full of new features requested by Distributors. One of the best things you can do for yourself and for your company is to put in the time and energy to learn all you can about Four51.

A person who has been using Four51 for a while and comes to Fundamentals class may find that lesson 1 is review, but after that most people start learning how to configure the application in ways they never thought about before.

If it’s been a while since you’ve been trained, or if you are self-taught, take a class this fall. Register by Halloween and get 50% off any class on the calendar.

Have a great day, and remember that Add is your friend.

-Mike “Training Guy” Moebeck

Four51 just announced the print distribution industry’s first ever strategic Joint Marketing Agreement with the world’s biggest business software company and its vast ecosystem of customers (who spend a lot of money on print). Read our press release.

We are in business to help you connect, integrate and grow your business. So is SAP. That’s why they inked this deal with us. Here’s what it means for you:

1. Our multi-million dollar investment to integrate SAP into Four51’s e-commerce platform now can be connected to SAP software running on hundreds of thousands of end-users’ desktops at tens of thousands of buyer companies.

2. When those end-users need to buy print and other indirect products, they’ll have the option of activating Four51’s e-commerce technology.

3. The Four51 vision is that our print distributor customers and print manufacturers are now being positioned to tap into significant print purchasing occurring on desktops across the SAP ecosystem.

4. We are excited about this program because SAP has more than 50,000 customers. All of them buy print and branded communications and other indirect goods. I can’t give you precise estimates, but this is a market opportunity that reaches into the billions of dollars in spend.

5. We think of this as one big market because customers share an important common denominator: they are running SAP software at the desktop level to buy and sell stuff for their businesses.

6. With our SAP integration completed, Four51 customers running the SAP integration are now part of that big market with the same common denominator: We all have SAP and Four51 software.

7. We are underway with pilot projects that best match up potential deals with Four51 distributors based on qualifications like already existing SAP customer relationships, geography, product specialties, vertical market orientation, size, etc.

8. Our intention is to make this work so that our customers and suppliers get orders from a big, distinct marketplace (the SAP ecosystem) in a way that no one else in the market can.

9. Today, we’re sure of a couple of things:

• This is a great opportunity for distributors and suppliers who want to become Four51-SAP “Best Run Business Partners”;

• Distributors using other backoffice and supplier bidding tools won’t be invited to this party.

10. Send me an email if you’d like to party (tmorin@four51.com).

-Tim

P.S. We will be demonstrating Four51 with SAP integration at Print Solutions in Baltimore October 23-25. If you’d like to schedule a 20 minute block for a personal demonstration, contact me. First come, first served.

Have you ever been afraid to make a configuration change to a buyer site because you were not confident that you would get the result that you were looking for…or maybe you were hesitant to apply a custom theme to a live buyer site because you did not know if it would look the way that you wanted it to look.  Well, fear no more.

You now have access to a test environment where you can build and confirm your changes prior to applying them to your live production environment.

The Four51 test environment is an exact copy of your production environment from the previous day. You can access both your administrative site and any of your buyer sites using the same login credentials as your production environment.  The only difference is that you will enter through a different login page: (http://test.four51.com/ui/logon.aspx).

With this new environment you be able to make changes to buyer sites and then login to see how your changes will affect the site.   Not only will you be able to test changes that affect the appearance of the site, but you may also place orders to test changes that affect the order workflow.   For example, you may want to test things like:

• Permission
• Approval rules
• Custom Messages
• Custom Themes
• Text replacement options
• Html changes to product, product detail, and category list pages
• Payment Method options
  

With a nightly refresh you are able to run through a scenario again the following day if you do not find the desired results the first time. Then, when you are ready, you can confidently build the changes into your customer’s production site.

We hope this environment is a useful tool for you to continually improve the experience that you provide to your customers!

When you become a customer of Four51, you gain access to several different environments, including the demo environment. This is the same demo environment that you were probably exposed to when you were first investigating Four51 and making your decision about signing up.

The demo environment is primarily used to help you sell new customers on the benefits of creating online order catalogs and to demonstrate the capabilities of Four51. The demo environment is available so you don’t have to use live production sites of your existing customers when you are demoing to prospects.  This eliminates the possibility of compromising the proprietary information of your existing customers and clogging up the production environment with demo orders.

The demo environment includes all of the functionality of the production environment with two exceptions: actual orders are not forwarded to real suppliers and the normal email confirmations are not sent as orders are placed and closed. Other than those two items, all functionality in the demo environment is the same as in the production environment. Generally, new features are added to the demo environment at the same time as they are available on the production environment so the same feature/functionality set is available in both environments.

For every new prospect, you can apply a standard theme and upload their logo and create a prospect branded demo catalog.  You also have the ability to completely customize the theme on the demo environment, create your own categories, create your own branded products, and customize your own reports.  Or, you can simply use all the products that we have already setup in the demo environment – there are over 35 products included in the new demo environment.  You even have the ability to create a category that includes nothing but text and graphics to highlight your special capabilities, services, and offerings that differentiate you from the competition.  This is a very valuable tool that everyone should be using to win new business!

If you are unsure of how to access your demo environment, please submit a case to support and we will be happy to get you started.

I used file-sharing software to steal people’s identities and buy merchandise under their names. For victimizing more than 50 people and causing about $70,000 in losses, I earned the nickname “highwayman in the virtual world.” I got caught, but there are more just like me who haven’t been caught. Lots more.

At the urging of the public and private sectors, the technology industry is fighting a pitched battle to keep people like me from hurting people like you. Have you noticed? Users of Four51 have certainly noticed more stringent password procedures. Some have complained. In fact, some have complained bitterly.

Yes, today’s password security measures are annoying. But trust me, the havoc I can cause is a much bigger nuisance. Instead of an irritation, try thinking about security measures as an insurance premium; insurance against the thousands upon thousands of guys like me who want to steal your data and your customers’ data.

If you’re a distributor or supplier receiving orders on Four51, why not sell the pain as a benefit to security-conscious buyers?

Please write.

GK

Ed. note: There really is a Gregory K. doing time for the crimes listed above although he has no affiliation with Four51. There really are, however, Four51 customers who ask to have features like Strong Passwords turned off. We understand why, but the irritation is part of the price we all pay to keep Gregory at bay. Four51 customers who want to review password security options should visit Discover Four51 and read article #276736.

This is a quick update on Four51 progress with our SAP integration and what we will be working on in Q4 2008:

• We begin customer ramp-up activations in October. Our first customer is live.
• Great results are being seen with immediate and material financial return being realized at our launch customer.
• Numerous Four51 customers are asking to see the Release 1.0 integration of SAP. We have shown the product to dozens of print distributors.
• The feedback has been very positive to date. If you would like a demo of R 1.0 please send me an email (tmorin@four51.com) and we will get you scheduled.
• You may be thinking the tough economy is the worst time to consider a new e-commerce and back end product. We sometimes wonder about our sense of timing too, (after all, introducing a product that we’ve invested more than $2 million in, to date, at a challenging time like this, may seem silly).
• Yet, we are convinced the timing is actually perfect. You are wondering how to grow sales and profit. We have a product, price and program to help you.
• Keep in mind: SAP customers on average run 30 percent more profitable than their peers.
• We are here to help you grow your business and reduce your costs through our best-in-class e-commerce technology and now by opening our platform and integrating the world’s leading business management software.
• We are committed to the idea of making the print distribution industry a ‘BEST RUN INDUSTRY’ running Four51 and SAP. We hope you think our commitment is valuable and worthwhile.
• We also hope you give us a call or drop us a line to see what we’ve developed and are rolling out to ‘BEST RUN PRINT DISTRIBUTORS’ right now.

Thanks.

Tim

Think about the mechanic you take your car to when it needs repair. Next time you visit, take a look at the wide range of tools he has at his disposal. Compare his tools to a novice mechanic who starts off with a socket set, and if he’s lucky, some wrenches. Over time, as his skill level increases, he builds up his arsenal of tools. Eventually the novice becomes a veteran and he acquires tools along the way. His toolbox grows with his ability. (Insert grunting from Tim “the Toolman” Taylor here.)

Additionally, the more skill that he has with these various tools increases his ability to help his customers. Rather than having to outsource help to fix that intake gasket, he now has the right tools and knowledge to offer that service directly, making him more of a valuable asset.

Let’s draw some analogies to the graphic and printing industry. Are you utilizing all of the tools at your disposal and trying to build out your skill set? Think about your pre-press department. Even if you are still shooting mechanicals or doing everything electronically, layouts still need to be created and plates shot. What software are you using for those layouts? I would argue that at the very least you need Quark and some variation of Adobe’s CS package. Many pre-press departments have Quark 7 or beta 8 and Adobe CS3.

Now, if you are a Four51 customer, not only do you have the latest graphic production software, you also have a powerful online ordering tool. No longer will you have to outsource e-commerce services. It’s as though you just bought the newest tool for your box. But most importantly, do you really know how to use it?

Four51 has many tools available for you, including University Four51 and a knowledgebase that gives you instant access to the answers to the most common questions our customers have. There are also classes taught by, none other than Training Guy, who posts frequently on this blog.

The best thing you can do for your business is to show your customers you know their business. Tools are a necessity for everyone’s job. Whether your tool is a laptop or a socket set, your mastery of that tool is what gets the job done and keeps you ahead of the competition. Think about how you use your Four51 tool. Have you mastered it? If not, let us help you, help your customers.

As my colleague John Wangaard mentioned in an earlier post, Four51 maintains a variety of fishing lures to support online ordering. (Minnesotans of Scandinavian descent can create a fishing simile out of anything, including e-commerce.) I’ve been asked to write a few lines about the jointed blue Rapala, AKA the production environment. (Four51 maintains separate production, demo, staging, quality assurance and test environments.)

As John went on to say, the Four51 production application is like bread and butter. (Minnesotans of Scandinavian descent can create a dairy simile out of anything, including e-commerce.) Every 18 seconds a new Buyer-user is created on Four51 and they, along with existing users, ordered more than 60 million units last month using that one environment. Indeed, the Production Environment is where the action is!

With that being said, the production application servers work hard. They are responsible for supporting user authentication, serving web page requests, hosting the Four51 interoperability web and XML services, and sending Four51 system messages. We have a lot going on every day to keep all of these systems working happily together.

The Four51 application is also supported by a number of servers running specialized imaging applications (Pageflex Mpower). These imaging servers have been designed as a fault-tolerant/load balancing solution and each server can be used to assume additional workload at any time should one of the other servers suffer a hardware failure or be taken down for maintenance.

As Four51 usage goes steadily and rapidly upward, so does the workload placed on the production environment. The team at Four51 monitors each piece of hardware for performance which allows for pro-active action when additional hardware is needed to keep everything running smoothly.

Where does this impressive hardware reside? At the Visi Data Center in St. Paul, MN, which is a lot like Fort Knox except harder to get into. Visit the Visi website to learn about SAS 70 Type II Certification and other advanced security protocols like 3-token authentication. This is something we take pride in and if I were part of the Four51 network out selling my company’s e-commerce capabilities, especially in sectors like branch banking, I’d spend plenty of time on infrastructure scalability and security.

Jim

I was talking with a small distributor who competes with one of our newest, largest customers. The first thing the distributor mentioned when we got on the call was the press release regarding our recent deal with this big customer. Naturally, I was expecting the worst (because I hear it a lot): “How am I going to differentiate myself with your solution when it is available now from one of my biggest competitors?”

To my surprise, this distributor had a totally different take on the situation and it’s one that I think might help a lot of you who are trying to differentiate from large competitors. This distributor thought it was great that they could now go into a large account and provide the same technology platform as a billion dollar distributor. They also realized that there is still plenty of opportunity to compete using the same technology platform by being better at implementation and customer service—they’re the distributor next door who can deliver the same powerful solution as the big guy in the city.

This reinforces the message that we try to give all of our customers. We always use the analogy that everyone has a telephone, but some people sell more than others by being better at using the telephone! Four51 provides a comprehensive solution to many customers in the same industry and, naturally, some of our customers are better at implementation and serving their customers than others. Those that use the technology to its fullest potential and cater best to their customers’ needs are the ones who are most successful with our solution, regardless of whether they’re worth one million or one hundred million.

Bill

Being a part of Four51 has allowed me to look back at my schooling and vocational experience and see how the industry has changed. I was sent this post last week and has made me think long and hard about how the craft and art of pre-press has changed.

In my first quarter learning about printing, I would manually shoot my film with a mechanical or simply a layout using a laser print from an outdated version of PageMaker. Then I would have to manually strip my flat and burn my plate with the negs. There wasn’t even a plate processor. I had to manually wash my plates and hope I didn’t accidentially scratch the image area.

You might think that I learned the industry in the ’80s. Nope; this was 1992. A reminder of how quickly traditional pre-press has changed.

Today, printing companies that have moved with the times have “content creators” more than platemakers or strippers (if any) and spend more energy on the latest devices that will streamline the process from idea to press than ever before. CTP or even DTP devices have essentialy taken out the need for impositioners or strippers in the traditional sense.

But this is the drive of the times. Your customers are demanding many more results for the dollar that they spend. Multi-tasking content creators are being asked to pre-flight, impose, print plates and possibly even run digital output devices all in the name of streamlining.

If the printing industry has changed this much in the 16 years since I was a student, imagine what sorts of changes will happen in the next 16 years.

Perhaps then, the title of this blog would be: “Can I get a thumb drive of pixels?”

Jeff

We have the opportunity to do a lot of fishing here in Minnesota. Over the years I have established a favorite lure, a jointed blue Rapala. I love casting it towards shore, watching it land on the water and leaving it a few seconds to float. As I begin to retrieve the lure and let it rise again to the surface, BAM, big fish, big fun! I call the blue Rap my production lure, but that doesn’t mean my tackle box isn’t full of other lures for many different purposes.

The Four51 production application is like the blue Rap, bread and butter, does what it does. There are also other environments in the Four51 tackle box to accommodate purposes other than taking orders over the Internet (which is a very very good thing!). We have made available to you these various environments so that you can:

• use the production application in many different ways
• perform sales demonstrations to your customers
• test existing features and configurations
• preview upcoming features

In upcoming posts, the team at Four51 will be discussing in greater detail why these various environments exist, how they perform, and what you should know to take advantage of them. Skål er fiske!

John

On the Pageflex side of things, we are working on our roll-out to Pageflex 6. I have been busy writing some new lessons to go along with the features it will offer. For those of you how have gone through Pageflex training, don’t worry, the fundamentals of variable text product building will not change. You will just get some additional features to use, such as:

• Text on a path.
• More adjustments for crop marks.
• A toolbar on the spec form for your customer to do some light formatting.

Lots of fun things coming up! But no matter what the future brings, remember that Add is your friend.

Mike

There is no right or wrong answer to this question, but here are some tips I picked up during our last Four51 Sales Training session:

•Visit several franchisees and talk to the manager about his/her headaches.
o Are their signs easy to order?
o Do employees quit before their uniforms even arrive?
o How many vendors do they need to contact to get their materials?

•On your visits, take note of the brand.
o Does it look the same at each location?
o Is the print quality consistent?
o Are the messages consistent?

If you can, take away examples. Now, think to yourself, where is there overlap? Are multiple franchisees experiencing the same struggles? Where are the win-win scenarios that will make both Corporate and Field happy? Are there Corporate-owned stores that could serve as a pilot? With these insights and examples you can confidently approach Corporate with a solution to the pains expressed by their franchisees.

Have you had success in the franchise space? What tactics have worked well for you?

~Maren

Each week I receive a handful of suggestions ranging from:
“Can you add a report that shows us which users are assigned to a group?”
to
“My customers are asking for coupon functionality. Can you add that to the application?”

After reviewing the suggestions myself, I meet with the Product Development team where we first try to determine if there is a possible way to solve the problem with current functionality. If we cannot identify a solution, we discuss the suggestion and how it would fit into our application design as well as if it would be helpful across our customer base. (We have just one set of code used by everyone so we have to keep the larger population in mind as we consider specific requests.) Once a suggestion is determined to be a good fit, we move it onto our roadmap where it is then prioritized and considered for a future release. Whew!

My point is that if you are struggling to improve a process or if one of your customers is complaining about a specific feature, let us know! Sometimes we’re even able to figure out a way to improve your process without any code changes. At the very least, the suggestion will go through our standard process.

This is also goes for a situation where you have a customer that you want to migrate from an old system onto Four51. It is in everyone’s best interest for you to be successful so rather than struggle, let us know. We enjoy brainstorming ways to support each unique situation!

All seller admin users can submit suggestions by accessing Discover Four51 and clicking on Submit a case. Click on “Four51 Software Support” and then select “Suggestion for Application Enhancement.” If you do not provide a lot of detail in your request, I may reply back asking for more information so please include as much background information in the original request as possible.

In case you were wondering…both of those suggestions listed above are real and
both are currently being considered for our next major release.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Nikki

The systems management team at Four51 asks itself that very question, and many others, as we design and maintain the hardware backbone of the Four51 network. Four51 maintains a fully-redundant, state-of-the-art network that has stood up to the scrutiny not only of our IT industry peers, but to a Payment Card Industry (PCI) audit (arguably one of the most rigorous IT audits in the industry). As an example, the database environment, where all of your information is stored, has twice the amount of hardware required to run the Four51 network dedicated to it at all times. If something happens and one of the database servers decides to call in sick, one of the other servers automatically and immediately picks up the slack with no data loss or downtime. It’s the IT equivalent of having two brand new cars in your garage, but one of them is a spare in case one needs to see the mechanic.

Our dedication to providing a fast, reliable network doesn’t stop at simply having extra hardware on hand. We have an entire team that constantly monitors the network for performance problems or potential bottlenecks. We have an intelligent monitoring system in place to determine when the application may be performing poorly before it impacts you, and most of the time performance problems are corrected before they are even noticed. Combine this with an off-site backup and recovery plan, and short of a hurricane coming up the Mississippi and wiping out Minneapolis there really isn’t much that can take the network down.

Sure, cell phones still go off at 3AM waking Jeff and I up to tell us that one of the servers might be a little cranky. Sometimes, regardless of how much you plan things out, things just happen. However, I feel a great deal of pride when I read an article like the one mentioned above and I can say to myself “that wouldn’t happen at Four51.” We’re proud of our infrastructure and our network….and as our valued clients, you should be too.

Cheers.

Ross

With more employees dedicated to green initiatives, awareness and attention to sustainable practices increase. As a vendor with a sustainable buying technology (aka, Four51), you are primed to provide the services and products these ‘green collar’ employees want and need. Four51 inherently supports sustainability through print on-demand capabilities, elimination of obsolescence, and reduction of waste. Several green suppliers are also connected to Four51, enabling a green flow through the supply chain.

By investing in people to enhance their green campaigns and not just new-practices, businesses are ensuring that sustainability is sustainable. Are you prepared to satisfy the demand?

~Maren

When I was selling programs like these, I preferred to limit the number of products and suppliers that I offered to my customers so that I could take advantage of terms and volume of orders with my preferred suppliers. I also knew those suppliers would deliver quality products on time. Plus, if there was something my customers were looking for that was not in the custom online catalog I created for them, I preferred that they contacted me so that I could do the research and continue to provide added value by making recommendations on new products and new suppliers.

How do you handle promotional products offerings?

Bill

Join the Four51 Business Card program.

You already know the Four51 technology allows you to establish online environments for your customers, you may not know that Four51 has established programs that help you leverage integrated suppliers to receive preferred network pricing and technology credits that can be used to reduce your Four51 bill.

In the world of print, business cards are often looked at as a necessary evil. They are the orders that few companies want and even fewer have determined how to sell them profitably. The challenges associated with low value, highly custom orders are obvious: How can you profitably proof, produce, invoice and collect on an order that has an average value of thirty dollars? (Especially when you consider the addition of internet printers who are driving the cost down further.)

The answer lies in automation. Four51 is continually working to make it easier for our clients to manage and process orders. Through our core technology and new programs, we are putting the pieces in place that allow you to drive profit out of even the lowest dollar product offerings.

Did you know that by creating a business card template for one of your clients you could be reducing the work associated with processing orders to a summary purchase order and invoice? A community of manufactures approached Four51 with the desire to create the most automated business card program available in the market. What has developed is a way for you to automate production of all business card orders.

When your customer places a business card order on Four51, you have an opportunity to automatically drive that order into the production and order entry processes of these integrated suppliers. What the automation means to the manufacturer is a reduction in manufacturing costs. What it means to you is lower prices, reduced internal costs and a reduction in your Four51 bill equal to 1% of the volume you send the suppliers.

To find out more about this and other programs Four51 is driving to automate the print supply chain, post your questions and comments below.

Eli

I have had a very busy run lately. My vocal chords are happy with me for the moment, though I do love talking…

At any rate, I recently conducted the first Triple Training week. I am happy to report that the class went very smoothly. It was, however, quite intense and some of the attendees were a little panicked at the beginning. Luckily, everyone survived. I look forward to conducting another session like it in September and October.

I realize that the intensity of these classes is quite high. This was done consciously because we cover a lot of ground in a finite amount of time. That said, I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that I have built in a lot of time to be used practicing the skills you have learned and each lesson builds off of the last. This way, the skills you learned at the beginning of the course are still being used at the end of the course. The idea is to work the basics of the application as many times as possible while continuing to learn more advanced subjects as the course goes on.

Anyone can attend training and leave proficient at using the application. There are a couple of key things to keep in mind as you mentally prepare to come to Minneapolis:

Contemplate how the application can be used to bring new customers online. Think about the last deal you didn’t get and then when you’re here (keeping an open mind!), start imagining what you would show a prospect in your next pitch.

Thank you to everyone for stopping by, and never forget…

Add is your friend.

Mike

]]> http://www.insightsfour51.com/?feed=rss2&p=409 0 http://www.insightsfour51.com/?p=409 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/four51_customers/~3/zFWEiU2d_IU/ http://www.insightsfour51.com/?p=400#comments Wed, 20 Aug 2008 12:00:03 +0000 info@four51.com (Four51) http://www.insightsfour51.com/?p=400 You have probably heard Four51 describe itself as a network, either during the sales process or in our regular communications. But what does that really mean to you and your business? To be honest with you, not a lot…until now.

The fact that our application is built on a network architecture really only becomes valuable when it is used to drive meaningful business results that its participants would not receive on their own. Until this point, many of you have received value by either winning new business with e-commerce, solidifying your existing accounts, or driving efficiencies by connecting to your existing manufacturing partners.

While all of these business solutions are important and provide a return on your investment, they could be attained on a stand-alone application just as easily as one that is built as a network. So how does Four51 create the additional value a network has to offer you and your business?

What if we made it easy for you to expand the product breadth you sell to your clients? How about putting together complete sites that you can use to win new clients in industries like real estate and automotive? What about creating manufacturing efficiencies that are directly used to reduce the amount of money you pay to Four51?

Through a program called Connect Four51 we are doing all of these things and more. 2008 is the year that you will begin to realize the difference between a network and a web to print application. I will be using this blog to help you understand how to get more out of your technology investment. Look forward to additional posts about reducing your Four51 bill and how to easily drive more business online.

Eli

]]> http://www.insightsfour51.com/?feed=rss2&p=400 0 http://www.insightsfour51.com/?p=400 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/four51_customers/~3/0P1sKCUy33Q/ http://www.insightsfour51.com/?p=394#comments Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:00:14 +0000 info@four51.com (Four51) http://www.insightsfour51.com/?p=394 I know that things get to be a little crazier than usual around release time at Four51 and I’ll bet that may be the case for others of you as well. There is scheduled downtime to announce, training to complete and documentation to update, never mind actually implementing the cool (and helpful) new features!

It has now been about eight weeks since Release 8 was deployed so I decided to take a few minutes to compile a list of some of the features and provide a quick refresher.

 Split Billing
Setup a buyer with a spending account and if the order total exceeds the account balance the user will be prompted to select another payment method to cover the difference.

 Shipment Report
This report contains all shipping information that is entered on the seller interface including the quantity shipped, date shipped and tracking number.

 Product Detail Spec Form
Enhance the buyer users’ experience by customizing some of the information on the product detail page per product.

 Themes–Custom Error Page
Buyer sites with custom themes can now have a custom error page as well. Just be sure to include the necessary tokens so Four51 Support can assist you if problems arise!

Click here to find the Release 8 Release Notes which lists all the features that were included.

The technology team at Four51 has jumped right into tasks related to Release 9 and I’ll be back soon with updates!

Nikki

]]> http://www.insightsfour51.com/?feed=rss2&p=394 0 http://www.insightsfour51.com/?p=394 2008 Four51Four51nonadultInsights Four51 - Four51-centric