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

Breakin’ All the Rules

I received an email from someone Group SPR alerting me to some graphics that were created at Disrupt and sponsored by, apparently, GE. The email declared that I was “allowed” to republish this story if I include the link back to the site. The graphics are the story, there is no text, and each graphic ...

Governments or Social Networks?

French President kicked off the gathering in Paris, hailing the assembled players as the leaders of the “Internet revolution”, but warning that with their power comes great responsibility. He hailed the role of the Internet in helping protestors organise recent Arab uprisings such as the revolutions in Tunisia and  but insisted it must be underpinned by “values” ...

Head in the Cloud

Yesterday at the Pervasive Software Metamorphosis event I spoke on a panel hosted by the esteemed Ray Wang and on this panel, which was for an audience of journalists and analysts, we talked about the cloud and big data. Here’s my take on a range of topics we discussed: 1) Amazon Out(r)age It happened and we ...

The Interest Graph, People are Complicated

For several years now we have become comfortable with the computer science notion that a graph maps our people connections. The concept of social graph has moved from arcane geek speek to that of mainstream concept, thanks largely to Facebook but certainly not exclusively because of Facebook. In the U.S. alone more people have social ...

Selling My Personalized Rate Card and Amazon’s New Kindle Pricing

Amazon announced a version of the Kindle that can be had for $25 less, providing you are willing to subject yourself to screensavers that are ads and banner ads at the bottom of the home screen. I don’t have a problem with ads but my reaction is still negative. Amazon is saying I am only ...

+1 on +1

Okay so it’s not as mass market as the Like button is, but Google’s attempt to embrace social interactions is a better start than people are giving them credit for. I agree with Louis, this is a hint at a future rather than a capability they are ready to lead with today. Google can use ...

The Crowdsourcing Sweatshop, Not Really

There is a lot going on in this review of the a SXSW session on the “dark side of social media” and the participants are raising really interesting points of view, but I want to focus in on one particular passage: In many cases, companies have persuaded people to complete simple tasks for no pay ...

And Doggonit, People Like Me!

We have been using Rah Feedback for a while now and by way of feedback… I’m not liking it. Rah is a lightweight feedback tool that your colleagues can use to evaluate you on a number of dimensions. This is, IMO, the problem… it’s lightweight, which means it is entirely measuring how someone feels about ...

Retargeting Ad Campaigns

I read that RadiumOne raised more money at a valuation rumored to be $200m. I can see that. Retargeting is very popular and for good reason, it works. You have seen this in action, you go to a website and then the display ads seem to follow you in subsequent unrelated websites that you click ...

QR Codes, Undecided

I love QR codes. They gives me something to do with the barcode scanner on my Evo. And occasionally they perform a function that is actually useful. A few weeks ago I started poking around and trying out different apps for creating my own QR codes and, surprisingly, it turned out to be a lot ...