Author: christopherskinner4136

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A sync technology with no backdoors?

A Secure, Compartmentalized File Sync Tool

The SpiderOak Sync tool offers easy and fast file sharing and sync with guarantees of integrity, authority, and confidentiality through our use of private blockchain technology. While the mobile file sync and collaboration are similar to other public cloud solutions, SpiderOak offers a fundamentally different approach to software. Responsibility for authority, identity, integrity and confidentiality are removed from networks & servers, simplifying your threat model and giving you greater control over your organization’s security.

Most file sync and collaboration tools have significant drawbacks in either security or ease of use. SpiderOak Sync is a rare combination of best in class security with intuitive, user-friendly design.  Sync is available for both on-premises deployment as well as SpiderOak hosted cloud installations to meet your needs in budget, security, and data placement.

Software Approach.

Organizational Control of Authority, Identity, Integrity and Confidentiality.

Data messaging and storage is handled through client-based end-to-end encryption for confidentiality with the use of blockchain for managing identity, integrity, and authority. Accounts are identified by private key material held only by the user, and data is encrypted against device-specific keys held within device TPMs, HSMs, and SEs where available.

Data flows are segmented first by teams within a platform instance, and then further by channels within teams. Each segmentation is cryptographically enforced, so that users within each grouping are unable to view data in another segmentation. Administrative authority within a team does not imply any capabilities within channels, including capabilities to read or write. Only entities that have been “invited” to participate within a channel can do so, and the record of team and channel authority and membership is recorded and managed via blockchain. This use of blockchain provides an irrefutable record of which entities are allowed to administer or participate within a channel, without requiring any central point of authority to dictate these rights. 

In addition, Sync supports optional features such as secure deletion, retention polices, LDAP integration, and escrow for message data and objects when it is needed for regulatory compliance.

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Why retail should be customer focused

We are so lucky that we can buy nearly anything we want online. If we want, we can stay at home and wait to get a new pair of shoes, a replacement phone protector, toilet paper even… Why do we still bother to go to actual stores?

I read a great article about the whole “is retail really dying” question, and depending on your school of thought it may or may not surprise you. Retail is growing! But not everyone is so lucky. We have our winners and losers and they’re not all expensive stores, or even thrifty ones.

The common denominator is that they share the philosophy of giving their customers what they want, or surprising them with things that match their personality.

Who can we thank? Amazon.

Whether we agree with their principles or business, Amazon has changed how retail operates. How can you compete with a website that has everything you could ever want? You surprise and delight your customers.

I live around a lot of cute boutiques in a very hipster neighborhood, and they thrive because they stock what people want or expect. I’ll casually walk into a shop when I don’t even need to buy anything, but I do anyway because I am delighted at what I find.

The same can be said for the other retailers that are doing well: Dollar General, Tiffany & Company, my favorite shop down the street where I bought my “plant mom” iron-on patch.

This is exactly what we believe can save retailers, or frankly, any business competing with a big market leader. It’s not always a price war.

When businesses figure out what their purpose is, and who their customers are, they win. It goes beyond demographics and dives into personalities, motivations, hopes and dreams even. You don’t need to be the biggest, you just need to be the best for the people who mesh well with you.

Written by Madelyn Skinner.
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The Messy Middle of Business and Secrets

It seems like we work in the messy middle… always.

Amy Young said it best, “My name is Amy and I live in the messy middle of life. I have been Redeemed from permanent muck and live with the tension of the Already and Not Yet.”

We are never out of a messy middle. Things always change. Can you imagine the impact of the telegram? Steam engine? Clayton Christensen? Jeff Bezos? Does it stop?

Our digital world also brings amazing speed and access. AI, IoT, APIs, connected and driverless everything are on the edge but ‘not yet’. Tesla produces 0.25% of Toyota’s output. Lots of promise but… not yet.

“The messy middle of change can become the wasteland where good ideas go to die — or a place that creates confidence and energizes action…”

Our digital world brings the risk of knowing too much, but also not knowing enough. What?? Let me explain.

It feels like we are in the messy middle of digital marketing, analytics, statistics. All of it. We know what devices people are using when they visit our website. We know how long they spend on the homepage. We know what they click. We know their ages. How old they are. Urban v rural. All that data.

It’s a lot of data to look at, but also does that really tell you who I am? Can you take the data and create some content or speak to me in a way that will really resonate with me?

We often see that businesses have the data everyone else has, but branding doesn’t match. The website is geared towards middle-aged women when the customers are actually young, urban single men. Imagine speaking the language of your best customers, matching your brand to them.

When your brand isn’t matching your customers, you’re definitely in the messy middle. At MakeBuzz, we don’t claim to have solved every problem, but we can help navigate out of the depths of the messy middle. We’ve got the entire US CRM. Can you imagine the possibilities? We can.

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How Kohl’s can continue their retail success

In 2017, Americans spent $130.6 trillion and names like Target, Lululemon, and (no surprise) Amazon saw increases in sales from the last year. The winners are no doubt impressive, the big question is how will retail adapt? What are the next steps? Is it too late? Absolutely not.

Recently, we heard about Kohl’s plans to partner with grocery stores. How should they, and similar retailers choose who to partner with?

First, retailers need to see who is in their geo-fence to see who their customers are. What retailers make sense to include?

Next, these partner retailers should place products appropriate to the location.

Finally, after you geo-fence your customers, get to know when personally. What are their temperaments? Personalities? What kind of products match the personalities of the best customers?

Don’t average and aim to make everyone happy. When you do that, you make less people happy. Delighting your best customers means positive word of mouth, whether online or social. People trust their peers.

It’s an interesting time for retail – we see some clear winners and we see a lot of closures (think about Sam’s Clubs). We are confident we have the key to winning.

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You Don’t Need more Traffic. Just Stop Wasting It

We live in a hype cycle. First, there was the dot com era and any business with a website was going to rule the world. Then it was social, and he who has the most likes, friends, followers wins, right? Remember that? Somewhere in between it was all about Google search rankings and website visitors and duration of site visit (if you were more sophisticated).

All these metrics to track and report, yet no one gets customers. Did you hear me? No one gets revenue or the customer. Do you want likes and engagement and page views and server-melting numbers of website visitors, or do you want customers?

For the sake of argument, let’s assume you want customers. If you think “well, likes and engagement LEAD to more customers”, just think different for a few more minutes. Keep an open mind.

So you want customers. Or, more accurately, you want sales. Where do sales come from? They come from customers. Who are your customers? Do you know? You have a CRM, that’s good. You know their names and purchase history. What else do you know about them?

Personality Predicts Desire. Desire Drives Purchase Decisions.

We already know that personality predicts things like career choice, success in school, what kind of person you’re going to marry. It predicts what Netflix will script (oh yes, they get this).

So, it follows that personality would predict…purchases! Right?

What do you know about your customers’ personalities? How would you even begin to know that? It’s hard to suss out personality traits based on the data you have in your CRM. How does one’s name, or zip code, or credit card transactions over the last 30 days translate into personality?

What makes a human being a human? More importantly, why do you care?

Personalities – Why Bother?

If your main goal is to increase revenue, customers, volume, it might strike you as silly to be talking about personality traits. Fair enough. You have a choice: keep doing what you’re doing and hope for the best as you watch Amazon continue to take over the entire f*cking global retail economy, or you can do something about it.

Demographics vs Desires

Your CRM, if you’re a company that’s fairly sophisticated in their customer data management, is probably divided up into a variety of buckets. Your customers have detailed profiles including all the information that you’ve gathered on them over the course of your relationship, like how many purchases they’ve made, and when. Where they live. What they do for a living. The various ways you can harass them with your latest marketing offer — via email, physical mail, push and so on…

You know things about your customers. And you store this “customer intelligence” in your CRM. You may even have developed customer personas based on what you think you know about your customers, to help the marketing department tailor messaging based on the 3-5 different customer personas so you’re speaking to each person’s needs using language they understand.

That’s great. If you’re doing these things, or even if you’re not but you realize that this is the current state of best practices for marketing and CRM, then you are the kind of person who will understand this next bit. This is where it gets complicated.

You’re an experimenter, you’re an early adopter. You at least know that doing the same things over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity, and you also know that you’re miles ahead of all the other companies who are obviously doing it wrong. It stands to reason that there’s an even better way — the next next step — and you may even be one of the very first people who learn what it is.

You understand that what you’ve been doing is working…sort of. Sometimes. But not as well as you’d want. And you’re not always sure why.

Quantifying Human Desire: Your CRM on Steroids

We’ve talked about personality. Now let’s talk about how all of this comes together.

Clicks and cookies do not equal behavior. Much less intelligence. What does real Customer Intelligence mean? Can you predict customers? By quantifying human desire you can do things that normal CRM “order history machines” can’t do. Predict based on theories.

Clayton Christensen speak a lot about theories and why the wrong math ship wrecks. We get that.

Our technology is a data set consisting of millions. The primary key is a calculated (predictive) personality type of each person based on real world data. Most people attempt to extend click and cookie data as “behaviors” or personas. True personality is the closest we have to predicting why people cry, laugh and buy.

Personality is the combination of traits that form an individual’s distinctive character.

Some aspects of personality are inherited, but most are learned through experience, much of it early in a person’s life. Once formed, personality changes very little during later life. It turns out that calculating a noninvasive personality defines who our best customers are. When coupled with CRM data, it places ‘guard rails’ on how that personality sees the business.

You can perform (prescriptive) merchandising and recommendations far better because suggestions are based on desire, personality and expectations of future customers. Sales go up because you are “delighting” and surprising customers and using elements of the past to drive the theories of future profits.

By allowing a business to have a precise view of their best customers and a clear “go to market” strategy. Brands stop wasting time on unprofitable personality types. Just like dating, some people don’t get along. Same for business.

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Why your CRM should speak human

Your CRM is often seen as a database by most. I see it as an extension of the human language. It is something to be appended with theories of people (The Clayton Christensen application of a theory, please). The only way this can happen is if you append not just the obvious data sets but create new ones that are 3 and 4 chess moves out. Most people are still trying to clean the address fields. I think it is time to own the CRM as the heart of the company. Not just the CRM as it is defined today but a future state CRM that includes the entire US CRM.

Time to step back: One area of focus for me has been the study of the Lexical Hypothesis. Also known as the Sedimentation Hypothesis, it has its recorded origins in 1884 by Sir Francis Galton. His book, Measurement of Character begun the long and somewhat long path to personality characteristics and language usage.

The Lexical Hypothesis is defined by two key postulates:

  1. personality characteristics that are important to people will eventually become part of their language
  2. the most important personality characteristics are likely encoded into language as a single word.

Research on this subject was slow as computing power did not exist to scale the research. It took some 50 years before Gordon Allport et al created a psychological classification of words. By combining this work with trait theory, one can begin to approach a classification system at scale.

Most input today on who we sell to comes from things that are generated with our hands. Clicks and cookies and past sales data really don’t tell the story of ‘why’ we bought what we did. It only records clicks. In a mobile world, click data mixed with desktop data becomes a mixture of conflicting stories. My point: we have bad data going into our CRM that feeds a stunted story to business leaders and marketing.

By studying personality characteristics without actually speaking with customers or violating their privacy, I found a way to connect the language people are comfortable with, the language in their daily life to a calculated personality type to CRM and look-a-like. I use Myers-Briggs but have also used temperaments, first studied by Hippocrates. It has evolved and to its current state by Dr David Keirsey, who calls it Keirsey Temperament Sorter (KTS-II). I also suggest that a conversion key does exist between DISC, Big 5 and MBTI but only for the purposes of growing a business. Our research at MakeBuzz has lead us to looking at personality of entire cities and States but not connecting this to a CRM is of no interests right now.

I would argue that because the data is now available, computing power, speed and capacity make this possible only today. Most research could only be produced at small levels, just like a focus groups always works from the lens of constraint.

All of this would be just research if you did not connect it to CRM. That is where you come in. By connecting calculated personality to what people buy, you see a source of truth that gives valuable ‘markers’ as to why people buy, why they desire and why customer expectations does not need to wait for purchase decisions. This work begins to validate the original research that dates back 132 years.

I invite anyone interested in personality, trait theory, CRM and customer intelligence to connect with us. It has been a desert. When you bump into someone, ask them for water. The good news, media is no longer cheap or that effective when it comes to filling a CRM, so now is the time to start from an entirely different and powerful direction.

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What the butcher, baker and candlestick maker always knew

Building a business that works like an old relational exchange model is possible today at scale. The relational exchange model is where the seller really knows the customer. Think Nordstrom vs Walmart. Nordstrom does its best to manage relational exchange models at scale. They did it without the benefit of much technology. So does the local store you shop at all the time. They know you. Maybe.

A long time ago, relational exchanges allowed buyer to seller exchanges to work well. The baker knew what you would buy. They could ‘predict’ sales based on who you are and some idea of past purchase history. Over time, they would get better at predicting you. Certainly buying bread every week does not predict the fancy cake. Subtitle hints could indicate a chance to sell that cake. The big assumption is going way back to when this type of exchange mattered. Your favorite coffee shop barista might know you but the minute you go to a new city, the far-away coffee shop has no idea who you are – even if it is Starbucks, who has a CRM.

For most companies, the only data sources to understand customers today are overcooked ‘data of the past’ methods. It is rare to find look ahead data built into a CRM or marketing plan. For the most part, it’s like getting socks for every birthday because you opened the box last year.

When you market this way, you are doing “one way to many”. It is a transactional exchange with very limited outcomes. Buy a printer, they recommend ink, buy a camera, they recommend a lens cap. Instead of guessing, maybe they could find other things that predict you want to go to Paris.

Due to growing cost and limitations of digital marketing and the lack of consumption of traditional marketing, brands must look to other things, like CRM, to grow revenue. The really good news is 2018 holds promise to inject relational exchange models into a CRM and entire business at scale without costly media budgets.

The downside is you must do things differently, but that’s where we come on. Let’s see how we can help you.

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Three Silly Things Most Business Do: Part 1

The list of things that people complain about in business these days is long. Very long. Pointless meetings, open workspaces, middle management lacking direction, websites that automatically play music, and so on.

Even though we could fill a book with complaints about the world of work and business, in my opinion only some of these silly things actually matter. Those are the ones I choose to focus on, because if they get fixed, it could mean the difference between success and failure of an entire business.

In the interest of helping more great businesses NOT fail, I’ve identified three “silly things” I see over and over. Let’s go through them one at a time, and I’ll explain why they matter in the end.

Stupid Thing #1: Extreme Caution and Budgeting Only for What “Works”

The world is unpredictable. We know this. Just accept it. You’re going to make mistakes.

Extreme caution and lack of experimentation in business is a problem, because this attitude is how you become the next Blockbuster. Or the next Borders. Or the next Sears. Or any of the businesses that didn’t survive a disruptive technology, as Clayton Christensen so thoroughly explains in his many books and lectures.

In my 21 years of doing what I do, I’ve seen things get worse. Have you? Most businesses still operate on slow cycles, budgeting on a quarterly or yearly basis. And while I understand that you do need to save money somewhere in order to invest in other areas, no one seems to be experimenting – unless you are the disruptor. There’s less room for testing something, because most of the budget goes into something that’s considered to be working. Is it working? Likely yes, but is it sustainable and will this way continue to work next quarter or next year?

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The personality of your customers in each state

Each State has a variety of personality types.

Some States have more types than others. If you look at the distribution of types of personality by State you have to wonder how this translates to your business? Do you have this same diversity by State? It turns out, likely not.

We have seen many examples where distribution of personality types by State is highly influenced by the brand’s personality and limited to the products they sell.

We have found that few brands have more than 3 or 4 ‘profitable’ personalities when you look at the means they acquire them today.

So if your best, most profitable customers are only ESTJs, how do you change your marketing… or do you?

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My CRM is Bigger Than Your CRM

We’re not trying to brag. It’s true! And we can make your CRM bigger by attaching it to ours.

Our technology can predict the personality of almost all Americans that spend money. So what?

By appending your CRM with the data in our CRM, we can show you some amazing things. More importantly, though, we can show you traits, desire and expectations about groupings of people, what they care about, and what they’re likely to buy in the future.

We discovered personality is the biggest differential in conversion rates. We have seen 30x difference between an ESTP and an INTP (for one brand, it’s totally different for you, most likely). Why that happens is hard to explain just like why some people get along and others don’t.

Here’s a hint: What people buy a year from now has little to do with what they bought in the past and everything to do with who they are. A year from now, what will you buy? Right! Click and cookies struggle but a theory of who that person is will not. Coupled with a client CRM, the ‘guide rails’ will create a subset of desire (products and services) within that brand.

Using “data of the past” works great of you are trying to sell ink to a person who bought a printer, or lens cap to a person who just bought a camera. But get beyond the obvious? Please stop trying to make that happen. It’s not going to happen. It’s like trying to see where your speedboat is going by keeping your eyes glued to the wake. (No joke. Looking backwards to move forward is an inherently stupid approach. It’s okay, we’ve all done it, but it’s time to admit our mistakes and move on. In doing so, you can also leave your competitors in the dust.)

As it stands, you’re probably talking about things like customer intelligence and customer behavior and big data and analytics and [insert meaningless buzzword here]. But you’re probably also analyzing “behaviors” like website clicks and gathering “intelligence” with cookies. We’re here to tell you that clicks and cookies are old school. Old school is good for the base line (your competitors have everything you have now). Time to move on and be predictive and prescriptive. New School is all about looking ahead, predicting, using machines that can learn and drive a business forward.