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

The Sociolconomy: Less like Mad Men, More like Dale Carnegie

“…successful companies will be more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men, listen first then sell.” Conversation is everywhere and there are so many clichés about conversation and business that it would be difficult to catalog them, but the truth still remains that conversation is at the center of business whether you are Zappos ...

Paywalls: Just Plain Dumb

I don’t know how anyone could look at the traffic data coming out of Murdoch’s paywall initiative and not conclude that they are ill-advised and monumentally stupid. According to data from Experian Hitwise, which charts Internet traffic, visits to The Times of London and The Sunday Times’ Websites have dropped by 66% since parent company ...

Semantic Debating: Measuring “Popularity” in Communities

Judging by the online reviews none of these movies should be considered “popular new releases” but I had to ponder this a little more before arriving at the critical framing question, which is what is the nature of popularity? The answer to the core question really depends on what your context is, or in the ...

Adding Chat to CRM Software != SocialCRM

I was talking with a friend who works for an unnamed big enterprise software company, here’s how the conversation went: ME: Hey, so what new stuff are you guys working on? HIM: Not a lot, so-and-so wants to build a social CRM product. ME: Really? I’ve been spending a lot of time in that market, ...

Nokia is Losing Fanboys

In a word Symbian sucks. It’s spectacular in it’s suckiness, so much so that even the most public of fanboys are abandoning them. I can’t continue to support a manufacturer who puts out such craptastic ‘flagships’ as the N97, and who expects me to use services that even most of Nokia’s own employees don’t use. ...

Journolist, Confidentiality, and Pageviews: Authenticity and Privacy

Last week there was a minor scandal involving the Washington Post and a blogger on their payroll who was covering conservative political issues for the Post. The short short version of the story is that the blogger, Dave Weigel, resigned after inappropriate and disparaging comments about the very people he was hired to cover were ...

How Important is Brightness

I read this and thought about the industry I have called home for 21 years: Mr. Katz was echoing Feynman’s thought when he pointed out: “And yet, brightness has become its own virtue. We’re impressed by candidates who appear ‘bright.’ I think this reflects the fact that this is the age of the college graduate, ...

Authenticity Goes a Long Way in Customer Relations

I buy kitchen stuff from an online store on Amazon that, I think, is run by a woman out of her home. Whenever I get the stuff I order I curse the manner in which it is packed because I have to cut through layers of tape and cut up pieces of Tyvek packaging. Today ...

Microsoft: Making Things Unnecessarily Hard with Windows Live.

Like a lot of people I paid attention when Microsoft updated Hotmail and declared war on Gmail. That’s a bold move and to pull it off they must be confident that the features they are delivering really are transformative… but having done it with Bing (love it, don’t use Google much at all anymore) I ...

Automotive MalWare, There’s An App for That

The University of Washington released an interesting, as well as lengthy and detailed, report about the security of automotive electronics, more precisely the lack of security. I would encourage you to read the report in full, it’s pretty eye opening. The key finding is that hackers will not be far behind auto makers attempts to ...