This trend is not new . Emerging from the previous recession, Kennedy Information reported that consulting firms credited closer client relationships with the first real increases in fees in more than 3 years

The 2010 Gartner survey also cites ‘Reducing costs via better efficiency’ as being a top 5 priority in both 2010 and 2009.

However, it is not easy for organisations to capture, measure and share relationships. For example, consider the scenario where a partner who specializes in E-Learning has read an article by ‘Mary Roche’, the new head of E-Learning at ‘BigPharma Inc’, on her plan to invest heavily in this area. The partner immediately sets about trying to find a relationship he/she can leverage to meet with Mary. The partner will typically go about this in a few ways;

• ‘Ask the Audience’ by sending an email to all his/her colleagues who the partner thinks works with BigPharma or their competitors. This is basically a fishing expedition that results in multiple email forwards, out of office responses and bloated inboxs.
• ‘Check the CRM‘. This approach relies on other colleagues having invested the time and effort to enter information into the company’s CRM system.
• ‘Check LinkedIn’. This public approach may give more insight about Mary’s past experience and what contacts the partner can begin to leverage in order to connect. This can again involve emailing or asking several 2nd+ degree contacts to forward messages to their contacts. It also fails to estimate which contact route has the strongest relationship path.
• ‘Google it’. This public avenue may find other routes to Mary such as a phone number or email address. However cold calling busy executives is not always the best way to build a relationship.

These typical approaches are currently available to most organisations but can be cumbersome, time consuming and ineffective. Many leading professional service firms are now beginning to ask is there an alternative, more efficient and more cost effective way to approach managing relationships and contacts ?

DataHug  offers a new system to  organisations that automatically processes their contacts / relationships information  allowing them to better identify, organise and share their collective relationships.

We believe that our system will give organisations with strong collaborative cultures a powerful ‘competitive edge’. An edge that will allow them go to market faster, leaner and better informed than the competition. A scenario where partners (like the one mentioned in the example above) can simply and quickly get in front of the potential client and start the sales process.

If you think DataHug’s solution could benefit your company and you are interested in learning more about  the system, then please register for our upcoming beta trial.

Thanks again to Gavin Daly for the coverage and to Breda O’Dwyer for organizing such a great event.

We hope to see you there and we look forward to posting some feedback & observations from this event.

Observation #2 – Hug; Everyone understands and recognizes the power and intimacy of a hug. It is deeply social, and on the surface, the antithesis of cold emotionless data.

The DataHug Philosophy is to help our clients embrace, share and leverage their private relationship data using intuitive and social technologies. In particular, we believe that communication data can be recycled to gain greater customer insight and operational efficiencies. DataHug helps our clients connect the dots in order to achieve the following benefits;

• Increased Sales. By unlocking ‘Relationship IP’, Sales teams can better understand who they know and how well they know them. This facilitates warmer introductions and more insightful account management.
• Risk Mitigation. By identifying bottlenecks and gaps in relationship coverage, Account Managers and C-level Execs can mitigate the risks of losing revenues when key employees leave, retire or join competitors.
• Reduced Costs. By automating the relationship capture and measurement process, Sales and Marketing teams can save money by eliminating ongoing data entry costs and expensive contact auditing projects.

Tweak.com aims to be a leader in the stock design market. The website is still in closed beta but you can watch a demo below. The first part of the video consists of Jerry’s views and lessons on business. The demonstration starts at 30 minutes and lasts for another 15 minutes.

We are looking forward to the full launch and having a go at ‘tweaking’ our new business cards, brochures and other marketing materials.

Congratulations to Jerry and his team.

CEPIC: Jerry Kennelly: Secrets of His Dramatic Exit from REELDEALHD on Vimeo.

In their research entitled “The cost of email interruption”, Professors Jackson, Burguess and Edwards, at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom, found that one company with 2850 users spent 9.8 million pounds reading email every year. They established that on average it took 76 seconds to read each message and that the average time to recover from the interruption was an additional 64 seconds

They developed the following equation to calculate the cost of reading emails every day:

ERD x (T1 + T2) x DS x NE

Where:

• ERD is the number of work emails Received Daily (excluding spam or personal messages).

• T1 is the average time to read each message, which in this case was 76 seconds.

• T2 is the average time to recover from the interruption, which was 64 seconds.

• DS is the average daily salary of the company’s employees, expressed in minutes.

• NE is the number of employees users of e-mail in the company.

This equation excludes the cost of writing email along with the underlying infrastructure and software costs to send, relay and archive the messages. However it does highlight the significant financial costs of reading email and gives a framework for benchmarking.

In his book ‘E-mail at the Workplace‘, Juan Carlos Jimnez concludes that the cost of email should be significantly higher at knowledge based firms that rely heavily on email for communication.

If we think that the average cost in time to read e-mail could reach 6,800 US$ per employee, there’s no doubt that e-mail has a high financial impact on any company. This means that the significance of e-mail at the workplace goes beyond the traditional technological and linguistic view that we have of this medium. … This time can be substantially greater in companies that provide mass services, which have an intensive use of the technology, like companies in software, telecommunications, finances, banks, insurance, utilities, etc

The book and research both suggest that email training can help reduce this cost by raising awareness and sensitivity to best practices. However they do not identify any software  that can help measure and track ongoing email usage metrics. Without sufficient and timely analytics, managers and employees will be unable to pro-actively address and tackle the high costs of email.

Wow. That may be interesting – but so what. Well, according to research, an awful lot of money.

Nine hundred and forty-eight dollars to be precise. That’s the annual dollar value of each person in your email address book at work, according to a novel IBM study published in the Winter Information Systems Conference in February 2009 [What's a Friend Worth? - Knowing Your Social Capital (Ching-Yung Lin)]

So using some simple arithmetic our users are already sitting on a potential $101,209,428 !!

Not bad – for 2 days of work.

… while at the same time having a lot of fun, generating a healthy return for our shareholders, and building some really cool technology

Connor & Ray