BeConnected

Geographic Customer Intuition: Census/Google Maps Mashup

We're all about the Customer Intuition here at BeConnected. Learning about your customers, their needs, behaviors and desires is so important for any business. For those addressing specific geographic areas when developing new locations, products, services or experiences understanding Census data is critical. Here's a cool tool that allows you to analyze Census data based on a one, three and five mile radius from a given location or address.

AnalyGIS: Census/Map

Technorati Tags: Census | customer | customer insights | intuition | Maps | demographics

PodZinger: Search Engine for Podcasts

I've blogged before about the tools that are out there to discover and monitor relevant discussions and media mentions of your product, business, competitors and customers. By now you should be aware and using tools like RSS, Google Alerts, Technorati Watchlists, the search tools in your newsreader and other customer intuition tools that may be appropriate to your work flow.

As new forms of communication and media distribution develop savvy developers create new tools to help users search and monitor these new messages. This is exactly the case with PodZinger a search engine for podcasts and video podcasts. Drop your keywords into the search box and specific occurrences of those terms are discovered and highlighted for your review. You can watch or listen to specific clips of the entire podcast. Nice.

If you are a technology company and you want to track mentions of your new product PodZinger is a great tool to track product names and measure the buzz across podcasts.

Technorati Tags: customer | customer insights | intuition | Podcast | Podcasting | PodZinger | search

Tom Peters' Blog on Defining Customers

Steve Yastrow over at tompeters.com has a simple definition of a customer:

Anyone whose actions affect your results.

Simple, succinct and broadly applicable. If we're talking about developing customer intuition and using tools to learn more about the background and happenings of our customers we better have a good definition. What do you think? Is this a good definition? Anything to add?

tompeters.com: Refine to Simplicity be sure to read the comments. Good stuff their too.

Technorati Tags: customer | customer insights | Steve Yastrow | Tom Peters

Put These Entrepreneurial Proverbs on Your Radar

Over at O'Reilly Radar as opposed to Radar O'Reilly, there's a great list of “Entrepreneurial Proverbs” that are intended for engineer types who want to start their own companies. Great bit size chunks for those looking to start a company or just wanting to shape some advice for someone who is.

Cool ideas are useless without great needs -- this is the classic engineers' entrepreneurial mistake (or at least I'd like to think so, since I've made it). Techies love tech, and a new technology can produce a lot of companies that don't really meet a need. Better to start with the need, and then see how what you know can produce a better answer to that need. (Marketers tend to have the opposite problem: real, pressing needs with completely unworkable solutions.)
Build the simplest thing possible -- engineers have the hardest time with this, with not overdesigning for the need they're addressing. Make the simplest possible product that makes a significant dent in that need, and you'll do far better than you would addressing two or three needs at once. Simplicity leads to clarity in everything you do.
Solve problems, not potential problems -- you can waste a lot of money implementing solutions for problems you don't have yet, and may never have. Work on the biggest, most pressing problems today, and put aside everything else.
Test everything with real people -- it's unbelievable how helpful this is. Go find civilians, real people who use computers because they have to and not because they love to. Find them in Starbucks, or at the library, or in a college computer lab. Give them $20 for 20 minutes, and you'll be paid back a hundred times over.

Read the rest of the list.

O'Reilly Radar: “Entrepreneurial Proverbs”

Technorati Tags: O'Reilly Radar | Proverbs | entrepreneur | puppy | Radar O'Reilly