Jeff Nolan

My name is Jeff Nolan and I write Venture Chronicles. What started, in 2002, as a simple initiative to understand this thing called “blogs” that I kept hearing about has evolved into something much more significant. Home About Venture Chronicles About Venture Chronicles My name is Jeff Nolan and I write Venture Chronicles. What started, in 2002, as a simple initiative to understand this thing called “blogs” that I kept hearing about has evolved into something much more significant. Along the way to becoming a bona fide blogger I started to understand the implications of user generated content. At the time I was a venture capitalist for SAP, the enterprise software company, and in my travels in the enterprise software market it became evident that blogging would be a powerful communication channel for enterprises to use, what we now call social media, and a powerful information collection mechanism for bottom up corporate intelligence. Combined with search technology, social networking software, and wikis, I was witnessing the inception of an entirely new generation of knowledge management software. I am currently the VP Product Marketing for Get Satisfaction, the simple and effective way to build online communities that enable productive conversations between companies and their customers. Over 50,000 companies use Get Satisfaction to create a social support experience, build better products, realize SEO benefits, and take advantage of brand loyalty behaviors that results in strong word of mouth marketing experiences in the market. I can be reached at jnolan-at-gmail-dot-com.

Latest from Jeff Nolan

My Steve Jobs Story

Like a lot of people I got self-reflective when I read that Steve Jobs had died. The public outpouring and memorial reflects his iconic status to so many people, and my friends know how I feel about it… which is to say it doesn’t really matter how I feel because I didn’t know the man ...

Life With Android, 1 Year Later

A little over a year ago I turned off my iPhone 3 and fired up a new HTC Evo Android handset, the initial experience I wrote about here. I recently upgraded my handset from the Evo to the just released Samsung Epic Touch and wanted to share some thoughts about Android after having lived with it ...

When Smart People Double Down on #FAIL

I awoke this morning to an email from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings saying he was sorry… although it wasn’t entirely clear if he was sorry for losing half of his market cap in the last year (shareholder) or sorry for the crappy streaming catalog and losing Starz while implementing a price increase (customer). It became ...

Consumers Exert Ownership

I have written on several occasions about how social network users and online community members have exerted their shared ownership of a service to affect changes in policy and feature. This comes about from the reality that a social network without members isn’t much of anything therefore the users in a network have a purposeful ...

Google Going All in on Mobile

The tech media, and general media as well, is all a flutter about Google acquiring Motorola Mobility (note that this is one part of Motorola, the other being their Solutions group which is 2x the size of Mobility in terms of revenue). Henry Blodgett thinks it will end as a disaster for Google and my good friend ...

Google Voice Gets a Global Spam Filter

I seem to have missed the news last month that Google added a global spam filter to Google Voice but thanks to the well placed reminders in the app I discovered it today. GVoice has had a spam capability for some time now and the way it works is really straightforward.  You can mark any ...

G+, Twitter and Tumblr are Biggest Losers

Like a lot of my peers I have been immersed in Google Plus for the last week and I have to give credit to Google for really getting this one right. The sharing mechanism is very accessible, Circles offer welcome segmentation of your social graph, and most importantly, it’s fun to use. Much of the ...

Voice of the Customer is Dead

Voice of the customer (VoC) programs have been popular from the moment that businesses first started having customers and in recent years the formality of these programs has increased and books have been written and many conference agendas populated with experts on the subject. VoC is dead and social is the reason. Paul Greenberg recently ...

CLV, Cohort Analysis, and Survival Curves

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is an important metric in any SaaS business, it explains the potential for profitability and more directly the extent to which a company should spend to acquire customers, measured as Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). Custora is a company that provides an analytics platform specific to customer value and survival, which is ...

From RSS to Glassboard

Marshall wrote a feature post on a new company spun out of NewsGator: Glassboard, which will open to the public next month, will allow iOS and Android users to share text, photos and in some cases location with small groups. It is built with Microsoft Azure as its back-end and will integrate with Microsoft’s forthcoming ...