By: Carmine Gallo

Software-as-a-service pioneer and salesforce.com (CRM) co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff credits storytelling as one of the primary reasons for his company’s rapid success. “Communication is probably the most essential part of my job,” Benioff told me in an recent interview about his new book, Behind the Cloud. The book describes how salesforce went from idea to $1 billion company in less than a decade. Whether you own a small business, run a large company, or have a great idea for The Next Big Thing, consider these seven tips from Benioff about how to shape and articulate your vision.

Commit to transparent communication. Customer relationships take work, and a big part of that work is dedicating yourself to constant communication with customers and prospects, says Benioff. “We invited them to come in and see what we were working on. We asked them to test it, and we made changes based on what they said. Having this kind of inclusive communication—sharing and listening— from the beginning set the tone for our entire company.” According to Benioff, salesforce used this feedback to make fast changes—”intelligent reaction.”

Make friends with reporters and bloggers. Despite a very busy schedule, Benioff responded to my interview request immediately and met my deadline. “I never treat members of the media as adversaries; they are friends of the company,” says Benioff. His relationships with reporters and bloggers have been a “pivotal part” of his marketing strategy. “Journalists immediately think of me as a resource for a quote or comment because they know that I will be available to offer fresh insight and meet their deadlines.” Benioff says that social media has also turned customers into content creators. “The future of communicating with customers rests in engaging with them through every possible channel: phone, e-mail, chat, Web, and social networks. Customers are discussing a company’s products and brand in real time. Companies need to join the conversation.”

Tell classic stories. Most reporters don’t care about a tiny startup, and that’s why Benioff never positioned himself as such. He told a classic David-vs.-Goliath story. “We gave the media something different. We gave them something new. We always positioned ourselves as revolutionaries. We went after the largest competitor in the industry or the industry itself. We made our story about change. We were about something new and different that was good for customers, and good for the community. We talked about the future.” Although the media landscape is changing, Benioff believes there will always be a need for content. The delivery model might be changing, but exchanging and sharing stories and information remains as important as ever.

Make your own metaphors. According to Benioff, simple metaphors are a terrific way to communicate your message. “I spend a lot of time creating metaphors to explain what we do. For example, early on I explained what we did with the metaphor “salesforce.com is Amazon.com (AMZN) meets Siebel Systems.” Later when we launched AppExchange we called it “the eBay (EBAY) of enterprise software.” Anyone can create their own metaphors, says Benioff. “Just remember to test them before you put them out there. Try a few and run them by customers, analysts, and people in your network to make sure they work.”

Keep everyone aligned. It’s not enough for one person to be on message. Everyone has to speak from the same playbook. At salesforce, Benioff made sure staffers could effectively convey what they did and what they stood for in one sentence. They created a laminated “cheat sheet,” with one sentence on the front and benefits of the service on the back. Salesforce employees and partners were even provided training so they could all deliver the message effectively and consistently.

Encourage presentation skill development. Want a job at Salesforce? You’d better be a good presenter. Some candidates are required to give a presentation in addition to answering tough questions. “Presentation skills are key,” says Benioff. “People who work for you represent your brand. You want them to present themselves—and represent you—in a certain way. Whether employees realize it or not, everyone in a company interfaces with customers in one way or another, and their attitude will affect the brand. That’s why we work so hard to make sure we have the right people representing our brand, and that everyone is in alignment once they get here.”

Display confidence. Benioff believes in dreaming big. “I believed that all software would eventually be delivered in the cloud. I had to believe in it passionately and be ready to constantly defend it.” Inspiring communicators are passionate about their mission—they believe it to their core and speak with conviction.

According to Benioff, you must be passionate “and a little bit crazy” to follow your own ideas and do things differently. But in the end, he says, it’s worth it.

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By: You tube

Entreprenurs are truly the key to our future and our present…. Check out this incredibly inspiring and creative video. Moments like this inspire us all. Please don´t miss it and I hope you all enjoy.

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By: Henry Blodget

Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in his Harvard dorm room in 2004.  Five years later, it has 300 million users and $500 million in revenue, and it’s worth something north of $6 billion.

Now 25, Mark still runs the place. 

He was kind enough to sit down with me recently to talk about how the heck he did it.

“Move fast and break things” is Mark’s prime directive to his developers and team. “Unless you are breaking stuff,” he says, “you are not moving fast enough.”

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By: Seth Godin

I was talking with a senior marketer at one of the most famous brands in the world last week. She said, “executives keep coming to me with stuff they find on the internet, stuff they find on YouTube about us, and say, ‘take it down!’ Of course, I have to explain that I can’t take it down. No one can.”

If your brand has any traction at all, people are talking about you. Of course, they’ve always talked about you, but now they’re doing it in writing, in video and in public.

Today, Squidoo (a company I founded) is launching Brands in Public. It’s a neat idea and I wanted to give you an overview and a first look.

You can’t control what people are saying about you. What you can do is organize that speech. You can organize it by highlighting the good stuff and rationally responding to the not-so-good stuff. You can organize it by embracing the people who love your brand and challenging them to speak up and share the good word. And you can respond to it in a thoughtful way, leaving a trail that stands up over time.

But how?

Over the last few months, we’ve seen big brands (like Amazon and Maytag) get caught in a twitterstorm. An idea (one that’s negative to the brand) starts and spreads, and absent a response, it just spirals. Of course, Amazon can’t respond on their home page (they’re busy running a store) and they don’t have an active corporate blog that I could find, so where? How?

Enter Brands In Public.

[see update at the bottom] Squidoo has built several hundred pages, each one about a major brand. More are on the way. We’ll keep going until we have thousands of important brands, each on its own page (and we’ll happily add one for you if you like). Each page collects tweets, blog posts, news stories, images, videos and comments about a brand. All of these feeds are algorithmic… the good and the bad show up, all collated and easy to find.

Of course, these comments and conversations are already going on, all over the web. What we’ve done is bring them together in one place. And then we’ve made it easy for the brand to chime in.

If your brand wants to be in charge of developing this page, it will cost you $400 a month. And once [we build] the page, the left hand column belongs to you. You can post responses, highlight blog posts, run contests or quizzes. You can publicly have your say right next to the constant stream of information about your brand (information that’s currently all over the web–and information you can’t “take down” or censor). You can respond, lead and organize. If a crisis hits, your page will be there, ready for you to speak up. If your fans are delighted, your page makes it easy for them to chime in and speak up on sites around the web.

If you have the tools and wherewithal to build a page like this on your own site, you should consider that. The challenge is getting it done, regardless of where the page lives.

There are already monitoring tools online (like Radian6) that allow big brands to watch from behind the scenes. That’s great, but what are you doing in front of your audience? Is there a low-cost, easy way to let one of your non-technical marketing people lead and engage with people who are already in the conversation?

We have beta-testers like Allstate and Molson and Home Depot that see the value of showing up where the conversation is happening. My guess is that other significant brands will discover that they can’t just rely on a static home page, nor is it sufficient to post an ephemeral response in a feed somewhere. Brands in Public isn’t the first, nor will it be the last place brands need to be to coordinate and organize the conversation. People (your customers) will find these pages, point to them, link to them and talk about them, creating a new circle of interest online. If you know a brand that needs to hear about this, there’s a short ebook (download) about the project.

It’s worth saying that we care a lot about keeping this simple for your organization.  A Brands in Public page for your brand requires no development team, no ad buys and no deep pockets. While you control the left-hand column and can pepper it with good stuff, it’s still part of a larger site, not “your” page. That means that the number of meetings you need to go to for approvals and permissions is going to decrease. It means that it’s not behind your firewall and not something that has to fit into the larger über-corporate strategy. More like a tradeshow and less like your home page. It’s in public. It’s simply a place for your brand to see and be seen, to organize and to respond.

I’m guessing that big brands are going to need to be in dozens of places like this going forward, because media has shifted from top down, “here’s what we say, we’re putting on a show, watch us!” to, “oh, you’re here, you’re talking, hi.”

The first 100 brands that sign up will benefit from a share of the $500,000 in house ads Squidoo will run across the site promoting the service and the first partnering brands. Sales are handled by BzzAgent, so you’ll be in good hands–please give them a call if you have any questions about the service. If you’ve got a brand that people are talking about, I hope you’ll give it a try.

[UPDATE: We're now offering free pages to chosen charities. If your non-profit organization is interested, please fill out this form. We'll choose a bunch each month, set them up and then the page belongs to you.]

[UPDATE: Our intent in building sample pages and letting brands see them in action was misunderstood by many people, and I can understand why. As a result, to clear the air, we're going to be taking these 200 sample pages down today. The only pages that we'll be posting are those from our sponsors, we won't be building any others. Thanks to those that let me know about their concerns, and I'm sorry for the confusion.]

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For all those inspired entreprenurs out there. Amazingly creative and fascinating facts. Don´t miss it… It´s truly incredible.

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By: Verne Harnish

Every year, since it launched in 1984, pundits have been predicting the demise of RIM, the famous makers of the BlackBerry – most recently given the success of the iPhone.

Yet for all the attention Apple and the iPhone receive, the Blackberry Curve is the best selling smart phone in the US in 2009 – and RIM, the famous maker of the BlackBerry line of mobile devices, has 56 per cent market share, up 15 per cent over last year while Apple has lost 10 per cent. This Canadian firm is also the fastest growing public company in the US according to Fortune Magazine’s recent list.

still remember Jim Balsillie, co-founder of RIM, sharing with a group of us that “if you can’t state your strategy in a sentence, you don’t have one!!” And RIM’s? In essence, “Easy in, impossible out”. RIM makes it very easy for corporations to install their e-mail system, but because the way the proprietary RIM software and servers work, it’s almost impossible to extract – or at least a huge hassle. So even though a whole host of executives may love to get iPhones, there’s too much inertia to overcome for enterprises to switch, a market in which RIM commands a whopping 74 per cent market share.

And the software and server side of the business commands 90 per cent plus gross margins given the fees carriers pay RIM per customer for the ability to collect, in turn, data transmission fees. It’s these huge margins that dwarf the margins pure handset manufacturers earn fuelling RIM’s continued market domination.

Though I’ve preached for years the importance of a one-page strategic plan, let me suggest that a precise “one-phrase strategic plan” must be the starting point.

Also defying gravity has been Southwest Airlines 38-year run. Today Southwest is the largest airline in the world in terms of number of passengers.

For Southwest, their one-phrase strategic focus is also an internal tagline – “Wheels Up.” If that expensive hunk of metal is in the air more than the competition, then they are going to make more money.

Though different than their more well-known “low fare” Brand Promise, this one-phrase strategy underpins Southwest’s unique ability to keep their promise versus the rest of their low-priced competitors. And this is why the one-phrase strategy is such a critical competitive decision.

Think of the one-phrase strategic statement as the focus for the underlying activities that differentiate your company from your competition. The key word is activities. As Michael Porter, Harvard’s famous strategy guru, emphasises in his classic 1996 Harvard Business Review article it’s going about the business in a different way than your competitors that defines your strategy.

In Southwest’s case, no advanced reservation seating and using the same aircraft type for all routes are two key differentiating activities. And by choosing activities that are impossible or difficult for others to adopt, you maintain your competitive advantage. One of the few successful IPOs this decade, Rackspace has built its business on a simple one-phrase strategy “it’s not about the servers, it’s about the support.”

Pegasystems has also nailed its one-phrase strategy, a strategy Alan Trefler, founder and CEO, has been pursuing since 1983. Captured in their tagline Built for Change, Pegasystems makes it easy for business managers to change the software underlying their systems. In all four cases, the companies have relentlessly focused on their one-phrase strategy And in the process have driven significant growth and dominated their industries.

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By: Seth Godin

I think it’s dangerous and often fatal to put free on top of an existing business model. Things fall apart.

People look at the free revolution and say, “oh, that could never work. If I gave x, y or z away for free, I’d fail.” They’re right. They will fail… If they keep the model the same and just give away stuff for free.

The way you win is by reinventing the model itself. So, for example, lululemon doing giant free yoga classes in New York. The more people come, the more clothes they’ll sell… it’ll become a movement. Or Crossfit, publishing their insane work outs online. The more people do them, the better the scarce part (private coaching, etc.) does.

We spent a generation believing certain parts of our business needed to be scarce and that advertising and other interruption should be abundant. Part of the pitch of free is that when advertising goes away, you need to make something else abundant in order to gain attention. Then, and only then, will you be able to sell something that’s naturally scarce.

This is an uncomfortable flip to make, because the stuff you’ve been charging for feels like it should be charged for, and the new scarcity is often difficult to find. But, especially in the digital world, this is happening, and faster than ever.

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By: Seth Godin

If you invent or launch or market (and you’re human) it’s likely that you have the voice of the critic in the back of your head. It’s natural to fear what they’ll say, and if you’re not careful, you’ll end up redesigning your product to please them before you even launch it.

Imagine the restaurant chef who changes the interior of the restaurant to please the Michelin critic (they insist on a certain quality of cutlery in order to award a three star review). It might be your boss who is the critic. Or consider the B2B manufacturer who alters the product specs in order to meet the standards of the GAO so he can sell to the US Government…

Some critics matter. (Your biggest customer, for example). Some are merely loud. Others are just difficult.

Janet Maslin at the New York Times is a cranky hack. She reviews popular fiction and non-fiction, and as best I can tell, she likes neither very much. She’s taken authors to task for questionable copy editing and devoted entire reviews to pointless rants about trivia. Here’s the thing: she doesn’t matter. Janet’s reviews appear to have no impact at all on whether or not a book sells. Her voice is not in my head.

Robert Morris, on the other hand, is a useful guide for people in search of good books. He’s reviewed nearly 2,000 books and received almost 25,000 helpful votes for his reviews on Amazon. If he likes your book, you’re going to sell more copies–not because he liked it, but because his thorough review lets other people decide if they want to buy it or not.

The challenge is in figuring out which kind of critic is worth paying attention to as you create your product or service. In a business to business setting, pleasing the gatekeeper and the bill payer is essential. On the other hand, pleasing an angry blogger might not matter at all.

In our desire to please everyone, it’s very easy to end up being invisible or mediocre. Far better to please the right people.

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By: Robin Wauters

Ever since I’ve started blogging about technology a couple of years ago, I’ve been consistently growing an immense feeling of hate towards press releases, and it’s not getting any better.

It’s not that I dislike the PR industry in general, although I often wonder how so many of these firms continue to be in business when the large majority of them have been doing it exactly the same way for the past few decades, instead of evolving.

When media distribution and usage was less fragmented than it is now, I guess it made sense for PR firms or consultants to write press releases using a given ‘best practice’ and pushing it out to a list of contacts in the publishing industry, hoping for as much coverage as possible. Regular TechCrunch readers know how we think about the PR industry – and some of its proponents – in today’s world, and in particular our stance towards embargoes.

I’d like to tackle a different problem in this post, one that reporters from around the world, whatever field they cover, will no doubt recognize. The issue I have with press releases, and the reason I think they are a thing of the distant past in their current form, is that they basically all look alike. Sure, the companies that are talked about can be different, and the type of news coming from them can be different, but the copy, form and style are often so much alike that for large parts of the announcements you could just as easily swap the names of the companies and keep the rest of the words. Oftentimes, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

My biggest gripe with press releases is that for basically as long as they’ve been around, they’ve contained the same damn words, rendering them completely meaningless in most cases and contexts. I wonder what the world would be like if these words were henceforth permanently banned from all press releases:

1 ) LEADING / LEADER

You know the kind: “Initech, the leading blah in blah blah blah, has partnered with Initrode, leader in blah blah blahblah blah blah blah.” Every single time a press release carries either one of these words in the first sentence, I cringe. Why? Because if everyone is leading, no one is. Period. PR people, next time you start writing a news announcement, ask yourself if you really should be using the words ‘leading’ or ‘leader’ just because it’s easy and everyone is doing it.

2 ) BEST / MOST / FASTEST / LARGEST / BIGGEST / etc.

Emphasizing the strengths of the company you’re pitching is obviously a good thing. But does anyone realize how meaningless these terms become when they are followed up by something so blatantly untrue or tied to a small niche that it’s just painful to read? I’m specifically thinking about press releases that commence with something like “Initech, the largest manufacturer of red staplers engraved with our company logo, has just won the Buzo Award for the most uncreative use of the word ‘largest’ in the history of mankind.” Handle these words with care.

3 ) INNOVATIVE / INNOVATION

The mother of all voidness. How many truly innovative products are launched on a yearly basis, regardless of the sector? How many times have you seen something get the ‘innovation’ label without merit? Unless you or your clients find a cure for all cancers, simply stop using it, starting today. Now that would be innovative.

4 ) REVOLUTIONARY

Much like the above, terrible word to be using in press releases. What exactly about your product is going to make people leave their houses to demonstrate, oppose their government, riot, etc.? Oh, sorry, you mean the company you’re pitching is not going to change the world but it is going to completely change the way an industry thinks about your business? Safe bet: it’s not going to. Likely you’re just doing the old ‘wishful thinking’ routine, and everyone knows you are.

5 ) AWARD-WINNING

Trust me, telling anyone willing to listen that you’ve been recognized with this or that award won’t be providing you with any goodwill right off the bat. There are exceptions to this rule, but very few (they include the Nobel Prize, a Pulitzer, a Crunchie or a Europa Award). Basically it’s like going around a party informing everyone that you’ve had sex with a human being last week: I’m sure it matters to you a great deal – and hopefully to the other person as well – but the rest of us likely don’t give a hoot. We also think it’s kind of sad that you are looking for someone to confirm or recognize your accomplishments that way. A tip: unless you’re announcing that you’ve actually won an award (which by the way is only very rarely newsworthy), leave it out.

6 ) DISRUPTIVE / DISRUPTION

Newsflash: a product or service is only very, very, very rarely disruptive. If there is a truly ground-breaking one, it’s also never disruptive out of the gate, for it can take years or even decades to turn an entire industry upside down. The fact that you’d use the word in a press release speaks volumes about your ability to tell your head from your ass: anything truly disruptive doesn’t happen overnight, and you can’t capture ‘disruption’ in a news announcement pushed out at a given time and date. Besides, if something is genuinely disruptive I’m sure it will require little push from PR people or firms to get the word out there.

7 ) CUTTING / BLEEDING EDGE

In the same boat as the words ‘innovative’, ‘revolutionary’ and ‘disruptive’: so often misused in the past that it now looks like you’re practicing your skills to write quality satire when you use it to tout a company or product in a press release.

8 ) NEXT-GENERATION

Overused. If you have an updated version of your product to announce, why not just say so? I simply cannot understand what people are trying to tell me when they say their new release is ‘next-gen’. Is it too advanced or complex for me to use and will only young children have the ability to understand what you’re doing when they grow up? Did your previous product version stink so bad that you needed to skip an entire generation of iterations to finally get it right?

9 ) STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP

Partnering with other companies can be good – and newsworthy too, though not often – but it doesn’t help you get more attention or goodwill when you announce a strategic partnership, agreement or relationship. We’re assuming it fits in both your strategy and the one of the company or companies you team up with, otherwise you wouldn’t be forming an alliance, right? It’s not like your agreement suddenly gets a whole other dimension because it’s labeled ’strategic’, honestly.

10 ) SYNERGY

Simply defined, synergy means that the whole in combination is greater than the sum of the individual parts working on their own. Used properly, the word can describe the magnified effects of two drugs taken together, parasites that enforce each other’s destructive effects and compounded health risks due to toxic chemicals. When applied to corporations, it means a financial benefit that a company aims to realize when it merges with or acquires another corporation. As history teaches us, there’s rarely any synergy involved when companies melt together or one takes over the other (cough, AOL-Time Warner). PR people, you’d be doing yourself a serious favor banning this one from all future press releases.

Bonus words: enterprise-grade, world-class, turnkey, premier, unparalleled and unrivaled.

Can you think of any others that should be given the kibosh?

Update: awesome! The Gobbledygook Manifesto (PDF) by David Meerman Scott.

Also, if you have links to press releases that are ridden with the terms I’ve grown so resentful of, do let me know in comments. I’ll help you get started with this one about Akamai and Delve Networks’ recent forming of a strategic partnership:

“Delve Networks, a leading provider of video platforms, announces a strategic relationship with Akamai Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq: AKAM), the leader in powering rich media, dynamic transactions and enterprise applications online, that will enable Delve to offer customers a comprehensive and innovative video publishing solution that includes video management and delivery including support of next generation variable bit rate streaming technologies.”

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