A while back, I attended a workshop for interactive marketers. The featured speaker was Jim Novo, a consultant with a plethora of direct and interactive marketing experience working on behalf of companies such as Cellular One, MBNA, and Comcast. Jim’s…
Toronto-based CRM provider Pivotal Corp. on Wednesday rejected a takeover bid from a Chinadotcom Corp. subsidiary because it included too many conditions. Pivotal said it would instead support an all-cash offer from VC outfit Oak Investment Partners which is valued…
Software maker Siebel Systems is going on the acquisition trail in its bid to broaden its appeal and reposition itself in the evolving customer relationship management (CRM) market. In a deal that could be worth as much as $70 million,…
I’m sure you read about it in the news recently. You’re likely to have heard about it by the water cooler. For a couple days, everyone talked about it. A company with an airtight customer privacy policy handed over the…
A few months ago, I wrote a column about the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) attacking alleged file sharers. The RIAA is forcing businesses that operate completely within the law to provide it with personal information on customers whom…
“Web Firms Choose Profit Over Privacy” was the title of a great article in The Washington Post earlier this month. It examines the privacy policies of a number of Web companies. In some cases, the Post found businesses clearly violate…
Pinpoint Inc. reportedly sued Amazon and six other major national retailers for allegedly violating its patents on software that assists online shoppers with their purchasing decisions. The Fort Worth, Texas-based company filed the suit Thursday in U.S. District Court in…
Enterprise software company SAP AG and Japanese electronics giant Sharp have teamed up in order to build applications that deliver real-time data across corporate networks to smaller mobile devices. The applications will be designed using open source operating system Linux…
Over the past four weeks, some better-known online news sites successfully deployed a strategy to drive down the average age of their users. The effort hinged on creating and delivering content targeted to younger Web users, those who typically avoid…
Congress struck a blow at the Pentagon last week. The House and Senate aligned to severely restrict a Pentagon program known as Total Information Awareness (TIA). TIA was developed to monitor personal health, financial, and travel information collected from commercial…
During AOL’s heyday, Meyer Berlow was the rainmaker. He developed strategic partnerships with corporations looking for access inside the walled garden populated by AOL’s wealth of customers who never ventured to the outside world of the Internet. These strategic partnerships…
This is the final article of a three-part series discussing RFM models. If you don’t know what RFM stands for, I strongly advise reading Part 1 and Part 2 before Part 3. Not that anything presented here requires an advanced…
Recently I was training a group of sales representatives from a software firm on the use of a sales database my company was hired to build. The database stored self-reported and observed data from prospects (primarily responses to an online…
In Part 1, I described how to build a recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) model in a traditional retail environment. If you haven’t read Part 1, I advise doing so before reading Part 2. Not doing so would be like…
RFM. What does this stand for? My mother might mistake these letters for the name of one of my favorite college bands (REM). A consultant may nod his head confidently, too embarrassed to admit he is unfamiliar with the latest…
Imagine this: You start a new job overseeing the Internet channel at a traditional retailer. Your first priority is to dig into the data to learn how your customers are interacting with the Web site. You meet with the vice…