Wetpaint Wikis: The Consumer is In Control

Last week I had the pleasure of an in-person briefing with Ben Elowitz, CEO of Wetpaint, the leading provider of consumer Wiki technology.  He opened with a story that illustrates how the consumer is increasingly in control:

CBS was one of the first big brands to embrace the customer facing Wiki model and when they cancelled the show “Jericho,” fans went crazy on the official Wiki site. The site was already experiencing rapid growth, but when the show got cancelled, the Wiki community powered by Wetpaint exploded with huge increases in the number of comments, edits, new users, page views, etc.  Consumers even created a “Save Jericho Coalition” including a group of websites dedicated to getting Jericho back on the air.  As a result, CBS announced earlier this month that they have ordered more episodes of the series. Nina Tassler, President of CBS entertainment, even posted a message on the Wiki that closed with, “Your protest was creative, sustained and very thoughtful and respectful in tone. You made a difference.”

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Real Time Graphical Reporting for SMBs: Corda Technologies

One of the fundamental strengths of the SSPA is our benchmark metrics program, and I am continually impressed at the reports members create to help understand how they are performing, and to identify areas needing improvement.  I’ll mention one great example:  Juniper Networks and their work around quantifying the ROI for self-service.

When I ask members what they are using for reporting, the usual answer is Excel.  While enterprise applications now include more reports and dashboards, they only recognize data from their own application.  If you want to report on data from multiple sources, much customization is required, or a 3rd party data warehouse.  The cost and complexity of this approach makes it an unlikely choice for many cost-conscious support operations, and definitely out of bounds for most small and medium sized businesses (SMBs).

Streamline Complex Issue Resolution and Move Toward Proactive Support with ISOdx

Two key elements of Value-Added Support are remote, rather than on-site, support delivery; and proactive, not reactive, support.  So what is the technology enabling this?  I recently had a call with one of the big software vendors that sells tools for IT to detect error conditions and proactively solve the issue before corporate employees are impacted, and asked them:  why aren’t you selling a set of tools for companies supporting external customers?  Their reply?  A very long pause, then a huffy, “That’s not our market.”

So I am happy to say that having just had a briefing with SSPA partner ISOdx, I now know where to go for proactive tools and change management/diagnostic tools to support external customers. Cranel’s ISOdx is a change isolation product designed to help tech support teams instantly pinpoint, to the character level, changes made to a customer’s technical environment, reducing the diagnostic process from hours to minutes.