Disruptive Conversations

Here at Voxeo, we're looking to hire a VP of Marketing! We've got a great team of people in our marketing group who are doing an amazing amount of work... and we're looking for someone to lead that team and help lay out a strategy to take us even farther!

Yes, I'm part of that team - I'm looking for my new boss!

Opportunities like this don't come along all that often... are you up for seizing the chance?

A word of caution... if your idea of a "VP of Marketing" job is someone who sits down in week-long strategy sessions, has long alcohol-fueled lunches, spends half the time at fancy conferences "networking"... and takes a few weeks to create fancy PowerPoint slides before handing the work off to staff or agencies to create glossy direct mail pieces before heading out to the golf course... well... please don't waste our time by applying!

Voxeo is a %#$&@$ rocketship that is taking on the traditional players in the industry and winning pretty much every major deal out there. You have to be able to grasp on to that rocket and if you can't... you're going to be burned to a crisp. (And, oh, by the way, you're supposed to be helping steer that rocket!)

It's an incredible place to work with an amazing team of people and an incredibly open culture. Coming up on 4 years here at Voxeo, I can say definitively that this company is going places... and this is an incredible opportunity to join the company and help shape that growth.

It will probably be one of the most rewarding jobs you'll ever do - and one of the most fun - and, well, a heck of a lot of work!

As the job description says:

The Vice President of Marketing will run Voxeo’s Marketing organization from Voxeo’s Orlando, FL Headquarters. Executives at Voxeo are expected to create strategy and high-level goals, and then jump in with their team and help get the job done. We are all “doers” at Voxeo. We work hard. We play hard. We’re in this to win it. Pure thinkers who don’t like to get their hands dirty won’t work well here.

Voxeo has the best products in the industry, a rapidly growing customer and partner base, an insanely high 62% Net Promoter Score, and recognized by analysts at Gartner and Ovum as one of the top vendors in our industry.

What we need now is a phenomenal Vice President of Marketing who will strategize, implement, analyze and improve marketing with a focus on lead generation.

We have an existing team of top-notch experts in SEO/SEM, social media, event marketing, and analyst relations. We need to improve our messaging, press relations, and again… lead generation.

And here's a key point:

At best 1 in 20 buyers in our market know who we are. When they know who we are we win almost every time. You need to get us into the minds of the other 19 buyers.

Ready for the challenge?

The job description has more of the responsibilities and requirements of the position. This position is based in our Orlando office as many of the marketing team members are remote and you need to be interacting with the other executives and staff. And if all you know of "Orlando" is Disney... forget what you know... downtown Orlando is a completely different world from the empire of the Mouse.

To learn more about what we do, visit our website ... but then look at our many blogs, our presence on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and the many (20+) other web sites and services that make up Voxeo's offerings.

I'd give you the links... but if you can't find them you don't deserve a chance at an interview, let alone the job! :-)

Come join us... it's going to be fun!

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Are you struggling with how to monitor and respond to customer interaction on social channels like Twitter? Do you have staff assigned to social monitoring but are trying to figure out how to scale your interactions? Are you looking at "Social CRM" and how you tie social channels into the rest of your customer interaction channels?

On Thursday, April 7, 2011, we at Voxeo will be hosting a free webinar called Social CRM and Building Apps to Monitor Social Channels where we will talk about how our platform and services can assist companies and organizations with scaling and supporting their customer interaction over social channels. The abstract of the session is:

Two thirds of today’s Internet users actively engage with social networks such as Twitter or Facebook. They use it mainly for personal communication, but often share feedback and thoughts about product or service experiences. Companies need to contribute to this conversation to protect their brands, enhance customer service or provide proactive customer care. They are or will soon be faced both with a staffing problem and the technical challenge of having to integrate with their more traditional customer interaction channels.

Learn how Voxeo can help you automate communication over social channels and bridge the gap between social networks and traditional channels such as IVR or direct agent interaction.

We'll have a demo as part of the session and will leave plenty of time for Q&A. We'll also show the analytics that are available for social channels... and how those channels can be integrated in with the other tools we have to create and manage "multi-channel" applications that interact with customers across voice, SMS, IM, mobile web and social channels like Twitter.

It should be a great session and the main presenter is my colleague Tobias Göbel who is quite excellent. Registration is free and we'd love to have you join us.

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If you missed the free webinar on Tuesday were I spoke about how to scale your usage of Twitter and social channels, Serving the Social Customer: Scaling Your Support For Twitter, Facebook and More, a recording of the webinar and the slides I used are now available from:

http://blogs.voxeo.com/jamsessions/2010/11/

Additionally, all the source code for the Twitter apps referenced in the presentation is available for viewing and download and can be used with a free Tropo account. Additionally, you can download a free copy of VoiceObjects to try out the integration with IMified to link Twitter to your VO application.

Have fun with it... and I'll be writing more on the topic in the future!

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If you start using Twitter or Facebook for interacting with customers and are successful - how do you scale that interaction as you grow?

As I mentioned in my report into today's FIR podcast, I'll be presenting in a free webinar on this topic coming up on Tuesday, November 30th, as part of Voxeo's monthly "Developer Jam Session" webinars. I'll be talking about some of the tools and services we offer that can help. If you would like to attend live and ask questions, the registration info is below or on the Jam Session page. If you can't attend the actual presentation, the webinar will be available for later viewing. Here's the abstract of what I'll be talking about:

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Serving the Social Customer: Scaling Your Support for Twitter, Facebook and more

Tuesday, November 30, 2010: 8:00 AM US Pacific, 11:00 AM US Eastern, 5:00 PM Central European

REGISTER NOW

By 2014, Gartner Research estimates that social networking services will replace email as the primary communications vehicle for 20 percent of business users – and for many people this is already the case. As you connect to customers in social channels, a key question is – how can you scale that communication? If you have only a few people monitoring Twitter, what do you do when they go home? As you successfully interact with people on Twitter, how do you handle the growth?

Do you hire a whole new group of people to “tweet”? Or do you look at how appropriate forms of automation can help you scale your interaction?

Join Voxeo’s Director of Conversations, Dan York, in this free Developer Jam Session to explore how Voxeo’s tools and platforms can help you scale your usage of social channels. You will learn how to monitor twitter account and take action on incoming messages or mentions. You will see how to send urgent notifications via SMS or voice based on certain keywords that appear in tweets. You will learn how you can craft appropriate automatic responses based on what customers send via Twitter. You’ll see how an automated app can assist the person monitoring a Twitter account in collecting information to provide a response. And… you will see how all the social interaction can be tied into the same analytics and application you use for other interaction channels like voice, SMS, IM, and mobile web. Plus you will get a view of how these services can be extended to other social services like facebook.

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Please do join us! It should be a fun session!

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Would you like to receive a notification when you are mentioned on Twitter? Or more importantly, would you like to receive a notification when someone mentions your Twitter ID (or your company's ID) and uses a keyword like "fail"?

Over on the Tropo blog, my colleague Chris Matthieu wrote up how you could do this in literally one line of the Ruby programming language. You need a free Tropo account, naturally, and you need a Twitter account you want to monitor. Chris shows the steps you need to go through to set up an application and connect it to a Twitter account.

While it's cool to be able to get text messages of mentions (something Twitter doesn't support directly), what I personally think is more interesting is the ability to send a message when certain keywords are found in a tweet. For instance, what if someone started tweeting:

Just had a major #FAIL with @company services.

Wouldn't you like to know when that happens right away? Easy to do if you are sitting there with Tweetdeck open (or some other client)... but not so easy if it is some time when you are away from Twitter.

Chris shows you could do this easily in Ruby:

if $currentCall.initialText.index("fail")
     (autorespond or send sms or place call etc.)
end

Putting that together with his first example of sending a SMS, your code could look like this:

if $currentCall.initialText.index("fail")
     message "Mention: " + $currentCall.initialText, {
     :to => "tel:+14805551212",
     :network => "SMS"}
end

That's it!

For more info, check out Chris' post and then sign up for a free Tropo account to try it out yourself. Sending and receiving SMS messages, Twitter messages and phone calls are all free for folks developing apps on Tropo.

Full Disclosure: Yes, this post talks about a service (Tropo) ultimately from my employer, Voxeo. I do write about such services from time to time. :-)

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Do you want an application that lets your customers interact with you via Twitter - but to do so via "self-service"? i.e. without a person having to help them? What if you wanted to make it so that people could RSVP for an event via Twitter and receive an automated acknowledgement?

That's exactly the type of app a colleague of mine wrote about in this recent post: Linking to Twitter using Javascript & Tropo Scripting. He shows how you can create an app like this using the Tropo.com cloud communications service and walks you through step-by-step what you need to do.

The appropriate automation and scaling of your Twitter usage is a topic near and dear to me... I've written about it myself over on the Tropo blog with topics like "creating a 'night service' for your Twitter account." (And yes, I do want to continue the series, since it's not really a "series" if I only wrote Part 1!) It's a topic I know I'll keep returning to.

Anyway, check out Justin's article... and Tropo accounts are free, so you can try it out yourself!

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Are you interested in how you can service customer requests across all the different communication channels they might use? Do you want to give your customers a choice in the way they interact with you? Rather than requiring them to call in to a customer service phone number, do you want to let them send you a text message? Or an IM? Or use Twitter?

If so, you may be interested in a free webinar I am giving tomorrow, Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 11:00 am US Eastern time titled "Unified Self-Service: Creating multi-channel communications apps using Voxeo tools". You can register for free.

I'll be talking about this concept we call "Unified Self-Service" where you can create a single application that interacts with customers across multiple communication channel (but not necessarily using the exact same user interface). It's a topic I blog about on Voxeo's site and mention in our various presentations.

Perhaps obviously to long-time readers, I have an interest in the "social" side of the communication, particularly as we talk about "Social CRM" and engaging with customers through social channels. You can naturally expect to hear me talk about that tomorrow as well.

Registration is free... and if you can't attend, the session will be archived for later viewing from our Developer Jam Session page (and if you register, we'll let you know when the archive is posted).

It's a fun topic... and I'm looking forward to the conversation we'll have tomorrow.

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If you are successful in establishing Twitter as a channel to interact with your customers... for customer support, service, general inquiries, whatever... if it really works and customers start to view Twitter as a regular channel to contact you on... how do you scale your support of Twitter?

That's one of the questions that has intrigued me ever since I started using Twitter back in late 2006 and have watched the adoption by companies and organizations. Typically Twitter usage at companies starts out with a couple of people... if it's successful, though, what do you do when those people go home at night? Have them keep checking? Wait to respond until the next day? What if they want to go on vacation?

If you are Comcast, you might hire a whole team of people (they did). This piece earlier this month talked about how Staples has grown their "Twitter reps" to 20.

If you have a large call center, odds are that there are modules now that let you connect Twitter directly into your contact center software. Ditto your CRM software... SalesForce.com has a component you can add, as do many of the other solutions out there.

Given that I work for Voxeo and we provide a platform to help companies connect their customers to information as quickly as possible, I've been interested to see how we could connect Twitter into what we call "Unified Self-Service" ... essentially the idea that you can have one application interacting with customers across multiple channels.

Back in March, we add Twitter support to our Tropo.com cloud communications service and I have been writing a series of blog posts about using Twitter and Tropo. As part of that, I am starting a series around how to use a Tropo application to help you scale your use of Twitter. Part 1 is now up:

Scaling Your Twitter Support, Part 1: Adding a “Night Service” via Tropo.com

I discuss there how you can add an automated agent to a Twitter account and set it up to be active during certain times. Next up I'm planning to write a bit about how you could write an app to augment a human responding to tweets. Stay tuned...

P.S. And naturally if you want to try this out yourself you can head on over to Tropo.com and set yourself up with a free developer account... copy/paste the code from my blog post and you're off and running...

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On Sunday evening I'll be heading out to San Francisco were I'll be speaking at both Enterprise 2.0 and VoiceCon next week at the Moscone center (they are co-resident). As I outline on a page on the Voxeo Talks blog, my talks at Enterprise 2.0 will both be on Tuesday, November 3, 2009. The first is:

11:15 am–12:00 pm – Case Studies In Enterprise Micro-Blogging Micro-blogging is taking hold within the Enterprise. The social aspects of real-time messaging promise to improve productivity, knowledge sharing and community-building. Organizations pursuing “Enterprise Twitter” solutions however face numerous issues: *What is the business case (including metrics and ROI)? *What are the policy, security, compliance, and discovery implications? *Are there best practices to help with employee adoption? *What application scenarios work best? e2 Moderator – Irwin Lazar, Vice President, Communications Research, Nemertes Research
Speaker – Brad Garland, CEO, The Garland Group
Speaker – Dan York, Director of Conversations, Voxeo Corporation
Speaker – Scott Mark, Enterprise Application Architect, Medtronic
Speaker – Wim Hofland, Manager, Inspiration and Innovation, Sogeti Netherlands

It should be an interesting discussion, particularly because my views on "enterprise micro-blogging" have evolved a good bit (and not necessarily in a positive direction) since I wrote my long piece a year ago about Yammer, Present.ly and Laconica.

Next up, and on the same general theme, is a "reactor panel" that is a bit of reprise of a similar panel at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston earlier this year, although with different participants:

4:15 – 5:00 pm – The Future of Social Messaging in the Enterprise The rapid rise of social messaging services such as Twitter creates challenges and opportunities for end-user organizations. How can end-user organizations utilize social messaging to improve external and internal collaboration? What’s the role of social messaging in a unified communications and collaboration architecture and how are UC&C vendors incorporating social messaging into their products? How can organizations embrace social messaging in a way that is consistent with needs for security, governance and compliance? Will the rise of public social messaging services render investments in unified communications moot? Join us for a free-wheeling discussion into the all of these topics and more. e2 Moderator – Irwin Lazar, Vice President, Communications Research, Nemertes Research
Speaker – Akiba Saeedi, Program Director, Unified Communications and Collaboration, IBM Software Group
Speaker – Dan York, Director of Conversations, Voxeo Corporation
Speaker – David Sacks, CEO, Yammer
Speaker – Eugene Lee, CEO, Socialtext
Speaker – Paul Dunay, Global Managing Director of Services and Social Marketing, Avaya Inc.
Speaker – Vivek Khuller, President and CEO, Divitas

Again, it should be an enjoyable session... particularly if we get to have a bit more of a discussion.

Both sessions are "slide-less" in that we as participants are not showing slides... just discussing the topic.

On Thursday morning, Irwin Lazar and I also have a "Deep Dive" on "Web 2.0 in the Enterprise", although interestingly that is going on over on the VoiceCon agenda.

Anyway, if you are out at either Enterprise 2.0 or VoiceCon, do drop me a note and perhaps we can connect somewhere out there. You can expect, of course, that I'll be tweeting from the show on probably both @danyork and @voxeo.

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Today I had the fun of filling in for Neville Hobson and joining Shel Holtz as a co-host for For Immediate Release episode #490. Neville was busy in his first week with his new job and so Shel asked me if I was interested in co-hosting. I happened to have a block free in my schedule in the middle of the day so I was glad to join Shel. Long-time readers know that I've been submitting weekly reports into FIR for probably over four years now, so I'm obviously quite familiar with the show, the format, etc.

As you'll hear in the show, Shel and I had quite an enjoyable time covering a wide range of topics about which both of us are passionate. The summary Shel wrote is:

Content summary: Dan York joins Shel as guest co-host while Neville copes with demands during his first week in his new job; our interview with Steve Rubel on lifestreaming and other matters is set for Friday; Dan reports that a lot of good content is coming out of the Inbound Marketing Summit, which is taking place today and Friday; Dan talks about his marketing and communications responsibilities at Voxeo and how he uses the concept he has dubbed “the attention wave”; Sallie Goetsch reports on the death of podcasting; Media Monitoring Minute; News That Fits: the FTC issues rules for affiliate bloggers in the U.S., companies continue to invest in social media but 54% of them block their own employees, a company owns up to unethical behavior, a deep dive into Twitter statistics including the behaviors that promote retweeting; music from Matthew Ebel; and more.

Links to the articles we discussed can be found in the show notes over on The New PR Wiki.

It was quite fun and I thank Shel for asking me. Schedule permitting I'd be glad to do it again sometime.

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