When he died, the cover of the New Yorker had a cartoon of him checking into heaven and St. Peter looking him up on, what else?  An iPad.  So began the mythologization of Steve Jobs.

There was a lot to like about Jobs along with some of the same lifetime baggage that we all accumulate, which was amplified by great wealth.  But for all the wonderful products and his habit of thinking outside the box—and daring us to follow—Jobs was also the creator of a company that built itself on the backs of plantation workers in China.

We can disagree whether this makes him merely mortal or something else but let’s dispense right away with the mollifying assurances that everyone was doing it.  That hasn’t worked since Nuremburg.  Nor can we say that the globalized workplaces in China’s fastest growing cities are by far better than the rural poverty many Chinese peasants escaped in going to the cities.  In poverty these people had a modicum of human dignity, in the cities, not so much.

What Apple and the rest of the global manufacturing community has replicated in China is not a worker’s paradise.  It might be the bottom rung on a global economic ladder and it is certainly a replay of nineteenth century Dickensian Britain right down to the air fouled from burning coal.  Articles in Wired, The New York Times and elsewhere have documented beyond a doubt the harsh working conditions that lead to glitzy and “insanely great” products.

But behind the insanely great is a brutal totalitarian economics—mercantilism—that shakes workers out of their beds in the corporate dormitory to go to work in the middle of the night.  Thought leaders like Thomas Friedman, also of the Times, and other people who ought to know better, marvel at a workforce so, so, so, what?  Dedicated?  Give me a break.

For all the praise and prowess of global manufacturing Chinese style, there is devastation back here at home.  The price of nicely manufactured devices from the plantation in China is structural unemployment.  It is no wonder that the recession drags on with high unemployment.  In the first ten years of Chinese membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) 42,400 factories—not jobs—decamped the U.S. and reappeared where labor rates of around $22 per day were considered good.  You can trace today’s unemployment rate to the factory-exporting regime of the last decade.

Steve Jobs is not responsible for all this.  Though Apple today is one of the world’s more admired and emulated companies, Jobs was only a part of a global movement of capital to China.  But the results in the factories reflect on Jobs as sure as do the iProducts and the Macs before them.

Forget the jobs that went to China, they aren’t coming back.  Ask for more humane treatment of the workers there.  We also lag at creating jobs for the new economy and that’s a serious problem because others can create those jobs elsewhere.  We can’t be a country where everyone goes to college.  Someone needs to bake the bread and we need to make those jobs rewarding.

There would be nothing wrong with making much greater efforts to redress the inequalities in the global manufacturing system.  Making manufacturing more humane by, say, eliminating the 16-hour day could be a great start as would making workplaces safer and keeping fifteen year olds out of factories altogether. That might serve to help level the playing field and with that we could even rediscover the virtues of Made in America.  While Apple still has the spotlight, we could do it all in Steve’s name as a way to perfect what he left unfinished.

I call your attention to a story about a little turd of a company, VIP Deals, that sells leather cases for Amazon Kindle devices, oh, and, stun guns.  Don’t ask.  They had been retailing on Amazon but today are probably selling at flea markets out of a ’95 Explorer.

It seems they were buying stars or more precisely the reviews of regular consumers who bought the leather cases and then gave them glowing reviews in the Amazon review section for the product.  The scam came through snail mail.  In the leather cover delivery package was a letter offering a full refund (A ten dollar value…) for the product if the customer would only write a glowing review on the retailer’s site.  News flash: 310 out of 335 reviews had five stars, which catapulted VIP to the top of the heap in the Amazon rankings.

You might say this is a tempest in a teapot but with Amazon projecting sales of 20 million Kindles this year, a few good reviews could set up the “heirs and assigns” of VIP’s owners in Margarita Land more or less permanently.

What’s disappointing is what we the networked did to ourselves on the Internet.  We showed just how easy it is to make a hash out of the ratings systems that depend on everyone to be good scouts.  The problem is pervasive in our society—not limited to a few undesirables who saw a quick way to make ten bucks.  That’s right, a double sawbuck was all it took to purchase the morality of 310 regular Americans.  One of those Americans was quoted in the story thusly:

Anne Marie Logan, a Georgia pharmacist, was suspicious. “I was like, ‘Is this for real?’ ” she said. “But they credited my account. You think it’s unethical?”

You think?

Really?

With what?

Stuffing the ballot box is nothing new but I won’t be so glib as to say it is a time honored tradition that in retrospect gets a nod and a wink from the winners.  For all the good that the Internet has brought and all of its potential, there is also the real possibility that some will use it as just another scam device.

The people who want to limit piracy on the Internet have a point and some form of regulation is going to happen.  Last week was simply an example of an industry laboring in an old paradigm coming face to face with the reality that it needs to change its model.  The Internet needs sane regulation, not the absence of regulation and not censorship.  Without it we’ll be playing whack a mole with little turds like VIP Deals, and who needs that?

~F. Scott Fitzgerald

This is not a post about CRM.

If you could apply Fitzgerald’s definition of a first-rate intelligence to a thing or group endeavor—always a dubious proposition—Exhibit A might be the New York Times.  This week the Grey Lady published two contrasting pieces that demonstrate the conflicted nature of our economics and the ways we think about globalization.

First up is Thomas Friedman’s opinion piece about Apple and its manufacturing prowess, through Foxconn, in China.  Friedman makes the point in “Average Is Over” that manufacturing has increasingly moved to China over the last decade because China is so attuned to the demands of global manufacturing that it can easily outcompete American companies with its flexibility to changing global circumstances.

Friedman’s example is instructive.  In his piece he references how a factory in China was able to move from a standing start to manufacturing ten units per day of revised versions of the iPhone (with Corning Gorilla Glass replacing plastic for a harder and more scratch resistant surface) in a matter of hours.  Friedman tells the story of how 8,000 workers were roused from their beds in company dormitories, given a biscuit and a cup of tea and sent to work in the middle of the night to accommodate Apple’s revised demand.

Friedman extols the Chinese for their work ethic and ability to provide the manufacturing flexibility that modern markets demand.  But a second article in the Times “In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad” discusses in fine detail the cost of that flexibility.  In the article we see what it really means to be dragged from bed and fed that heroic biscuit.  It documents 60 hour work weeks, forced overtime and working environments that are, some cases literally lethal.

The article documents how poor ventilation led to fires and explosions in manufacturing facilities and death to some workers.  It documents suicides too as workers jumped from their tall dormitory windows unable to cope with the demands of high production for $22 per day.

I think Friedman confused capitalism for what the Chinese practice aided and abetted by their government and by American business.  Friedman envisions a plantation economy, not modern business.  It is a form of mercantilism, not capitalism.  It exploits workers and other resources in countries where the labor and safety laws are lax and environmental standards practically non-existent.

Take a look at this list of mercantilist characteristics from Wikipedia.  How many do you recognize?

• Building a network of overseas colonies
• Forbidding colonies to trade with other nations
• Monopolizing markets with staple ports;
• Promote accumulation of gold and silver
• Forbidding trade to be carried in foreign ships;
• Export subsidies;
• Maximizing the use of domestic resources;
• Restricting domestic consumption with non-tariff barriers to trade.

Mercantilism requires two actors, the colony as well as the colonists, thus you have networks of colonies owned by the colonists and restricted domestic consumption in the colonies and this perfectly describes the relationship between Apple and other manufacturers and their Chinese partners.

Ironically while the business interests advocate a neo-mercantilism the U.S. government has had little success at getting the Chinese to open their markets to more capitalism, more foreign goods and to let their currency appreciate to more realistic levels.  This might look like a disagreement between countries but it is actually an argument between American business and the federal government.

This relationship disenfranchises both the workers in one country and the citizen-consumers on the other.  And this doesn’t even touch the issue of lost jobs moved overseas by the mercantilists chasing low labor costs and the ability to ignore health and safety laws.

A form of state sponsored desperation-growth drives Chinese mercantilism and a generation of its people ignore what’s happening in its factories in a vain effort to catapult the country from poverty to emergence and ultimately to first world status.

Friedman holds this up as some kind of aspirational goal for Americans.  He seems to be saying that if only we could be a little more like the Chinese we could recapture our manufacturing base.  But this amounts to prostituting ourselves, our country and its resources to a gratuitous mercantilist ideal.

Why not go in the other direction?  The opposite of mercantilism is not suspension of trade but trade on a more level playing field, one where profits are not made through arbitraging safety and dignity.  Real capitalism.

Companies like Apple have the upper hand.  The conditions in their factories are sanctioned either explicitly or implicitly by them and will only persist as long as Apple applies benign neglect to the situation.  Alone Apple determines what it will pay for components and labor so that it can meet price points in the Fast New World economy.

Other computer and consumer electronics makers use some of the same Chinese manufacturing partners to make their products.  We like those products a lot and we especially like their low prices.  But hidden behind those shiny new things and their low prices are 16 hour work days, no time off, regressive discipline and dangerous working conditions.

I like my consumer electronics but not with the hidden costs that are attached to every device.  Those costs include an eroded and impoverished first world manufacturing base and despotic working conditions where those jobs end up.

In 1906 Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a book about the lives of American immigrants.  The book spent many of its pages portraying life in the corrupt meatpacking industry.  From that book we derived the sage idea of liking the sausage but of studiously avoiding asking how the sausage was made.

In effect, we’ve been told not to try to hold Fitzgerald’s twin opposing ideas in mind.  But the Times was able to do just that and to offer us a compelling and discomforting contrast.  The larger question is whether or not any of us retain the ability to, as Fitzgerald suggests, function in the face of this information.

Last week’s smack down of the PIPA and SOPA legislation designed to build a back door to controlling the Internet was both instructive and fun to watch.  It showed the power of social media and of regular people coming together to let their voices be heard.  As the New York Times reported, it was something of a coming out party for the technology community both the new corporations and us users.  It was amusing to see the Tweets and posts from heretofore sponsors of the legislation that said, just kidding, never mind or “I was against it before I was for it…” and the like.

Last week was also a clear power shift from the paradigm of entrenched corporate interests to the commonwealth.  How long it lasts is anyone’s guess.  It didn’t hurt that the bad guys in all this were seen as the big media corporations in film and music especially.

I love music and movies and most forms of entertainment and as a rational economic actor I want those who produce these things to make a decent profit — why else would they work so hard?  But it says a lot that the industry’s preferred method for solving a serious problem like piracy was legislation and not some more typical response like engineering.

If this were the biological world, pirates would be equivalent to invading microorganisms like bacteria and viruses.  An organism’s typical answer to such an invasion is to mount an immune response.  That means building elaborate safeguards like antibodies and strategies to thwart the invaders.  The media corporations thought they had a better idea, which was to get someone else to fix the problem for them.  They enlisted congress in a vain effort to make Internet companies handle the problem and you know what happened.

The media companies have always had a business model problem and last week simply accentuated it.  Forever they’ve been selling a scarce commodity as a product that was nonetheless was consumed as a service.  They sold recorded media and tickets to shows and the public accepted it as a more or less fair bargain.  This partly explains the record industry’s eagerness to bring suits against individuals calibrated in units stolen.

Artists put up with the status quo because it was the only game in town even though the corporations ran their businesses more like plantations than as entities with any modicum of respect for artists.  So in a real sense, The corporations have always been the bad guys.

In those times packaging was sufficient for media companies to protect their assets but it is no longer.  Strategies beyond packaging have to be built and implemented.  What are the solutions?  Not my job.  You figure it out.  Just leave the internet alone.

In 1960, when Frank Sinatra finally completed his studio recording contracts, he started a record company, Reprise Records, owned by Warner Brothers today.  If you doubt my labeling of the corporations as bad guys, look up the meaning of “reprise” and you will know everything you need.

According to Wikipedia, which was not doing business in English last Wednesday,

“Reprise (pronounced rih-PREEZ) was formed in 1960[1] by Frank Sinatra in order to allow more artistic freedom for his own recordings. Hence, he garnered the nickname “The Chairman of the Board.”… “One of the label’s founding principles under Sinatra’s leadership was that each artist would have full creative freedom, and at some point complete ownership of their work; including publishing rights.”

Publishing rights were a big deal because they were tightly held by the record labels so Reprise’s approach caused an earthquake in the industry.  So from the IP ownership perspective last week’s action by some of the biggest names on the Internet was something that several generations could identify with.

But the greater impact is what will inevitably come next.  First, the Internet community, aided and abetted by the social media community, has proven that the public can have great impact not only on brands but also on the nation’s public life.  In doing this, we may have reawakened some civic impulses that have been dormant for several decades as we have narrowly focused on technology as something that only makes life faster and cheaper.

Last week, we rediscovered the commons, a place where people from all walks of life, not just the young, hip and technologically savvy, can meet, empathize and support each other.  Everyone in the CRM and social media communities should take pride in this accomplishment because this is where everything started.  But we ought not rest on our laurels because the next challenge is just around the corner.

1.  Did I mention they are a privately held company still run by their founder?  Today this private company announced record revenue of $2.725 billion in 2011 and increase of 12% over the year before.

2.  SAS is also one of the best places on the planet to work.  I’ve been there and I drank the lemonade.  Today I learned that SAS is ranked #3 on 2012 Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list in the US. You have to understand what a disappointment this is because SAS has been number one twice.  All I can say is that it must be hard to be a judge.

In America, few things unite us enough to spawn a strike, it’s not our style.  At least that’s been the case until now.  Today many Web destinations like Wikipedia (24 hour English language shut down) are staging some form of protest to air their displeasure with proposed legislation — the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect IP Act in the Senate — that would crack down on piracy while only damaging personal rights a little bit.  Hey this is war time, right?  Welcome to strike Wednesday.

The sides have been chosen pretty much like you might expect with big business — major media companies — mostly supporting and the Internet community in uproar.  There are many reasons to be on either side of the issue and there is enough material out there to inform you of each side’s ideological purity.  I want to skip that and look at this from a business and economics perspective.

The media industry including the major studios, record labels and TV networks have taken it on the chin in the last couple of decades.  Good, fast and cheap computing power and the Internet have made it nearly impossible to protect intellectual property from being massively and freely distributed without the copyright owners’ consent — at least given the current approaches to protection.  That’s what this legislation is all about.

The choice that the media companies have is to figure out solutions to protect themselves or to use their muscle to lobby congress to make law.  The legislative approach is much easier because the politicians are so much more cost effective than technology development.

Sidebar: I am continually amazed that politicians can get hundreds of millions of dollars or more set aside in earmarks or other gimmicks for their supporters and when it’s revealed we find that their campaign coffers have swelled only by tens of thousands of dollars.  But I digress.

Here’s my economic analysis.  The media have for a long time had a cushy ride.  They own the means of distribution, which enables them to cut outrageous deals with artists and others.  For example, a typical book contract is an 85/15 split with the lion’s share going to the publisher.  Record labels aren’t much different.  The media houses cite high costs of production and marketing but when you see what they’re willing to do to actually earn the split through marketing and promotion, you become jaded.

The media companies don’t have a copyright problem per se, they have a business model problem.  Their model is based on selling product in an era where the economy is moving rapidly towards subscriptions.  Subscriptions provide a relative drip of revenue rather than a torrent.  There are so many drips as to create a different kind of torrent but all of those drips must be collected through technology and there is the rub.  It’s a tough problem.  The media companies would rather foist the problem on others than either create a solution of their own or collaborate to create one.

But now the technology giants are correctly saying, that’s not exactly our problem either and we’re not going to do your bidding.  If anything the current controversy is the result of a completely uncreative approach to a problem.  In a situation where any number of solutions could be discussed, tested and tried out, one side has decided to dig in its heels and legislate.  That’s sad.

I am going to brush up on my French because I think I’ll be reading Wikipedia in another language soon.

The gentlemanly disagreement started over the appointment of PayPal President Scott Thompson as the next CEO of Yahoo.  Many people have questioned Thompson’s selection for lack of direct experience in content or media.  But as Sherman accurately points out, “If exact industry experience were a requirement for chief executive success, Lou Gerstner would have taken IBM right down the tubes.”  There is gold in that observation.

Thompson has been on Tzuo’s board of directors and it says something that Tzuo is willing to be so public about Thompson’s qualities and qualifications.  For his part, Tzuo believes that the key to success is to remember that Yahoo and the highly successful and iconic brands from the valley like Apple, Google, Salesforce and Facebook are all tech companies.  But I think the meaning of “tech companies” gets lost between Tzuo and Sherman.

For Tzuo and for me, a tech company is less about being a technology user or developer and much more about being an innovator.  The companies he and Sherman agree are iconic (and someday we’ll have to add Zuora to the group too) are leaders precisely because they are innovators and because they were first in their fields.  But even more important they have been successful because each in its own way was founded and led by a person who is what I will call a crisis leader.

I make the distinction between a crisis leader and someone who can lead and manage when the sun is shining, the birds are singing and all is well with creation.  At times like that everyone looks good.  A fence post can lead an organization because there is relatively little to do.  A crisis leader is someone who thinks outside of the box or better yet does not see the box at all.  I can’t think of a more crisis oriented situation than running a start up.

I bring you these findings not from my head but from the mind of a very perceptive professor of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine, Nassir Ghaemi and his new book, “A First-Rate Madness — Uncovering the Links between Leadership and Mental Illness.”  Just to set your perspective, mental illness doesn’t mean totally out of control and in desperate need of rubber walls.  Think instead of the phrase “crazy like a fox” and you get much closer to the meaning.

The book focuses on leaders in political settings and is most revealing, and entertaining in my opinion, in comparing Civil War generals William T. Sherman (Sherman’s march to the sea) and George McClellan, who may have coined the phrase “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.”  Sherman was crazy now and then, McClellan was the poster boy for a successful general — at least in peace time.

What does this all mean?  Well, for starters, if this is interesting read the book.  But related to the Thompson as CEO question, I’d say that as president of PayPal helping to significantly grow that company’s business in a new market that has required great insight and innovation that Thompson might have the crazy-like-a-fox idea well in hand.  His first job is or ought to be trying to figure out, as Erik Sherman suggests, what business Yahoo is in today, not where it started, and what business niches Yahoo can invent using its innovation and technology chops.

Over time and in other contexts I have been fond of surprising people by telling them that Edison was not an engineer and neither was Jobs, that Gates didn’t graduate college, that Zuckerberg is sometimes portrayed as a social misfit and that the Wright Brothers were, in fact, bicycle mechanics.  Each was technical enough but not so much that their training blinded them to new possibilities.  And each possessed a spark of creative craziness that is what I believe Silicon Valley is all about.

Scott Thompson, CEO of Yahoo.  Why not?

Things have changed somewhat in the last decades but the focus of most sales organizations is still on acquiring enough leads to fill the funnels to fuel their sales processes.  Marketing departments and software vendors have done a great job of improving marketing so that they deliver better quality leads to sales teams than ever.  Not long ago marketing programs consisted of gathering little more than basic contact information and coordinating trade show appearances.  But today’s marketing effort is all about drip campaigns, analytics and social outreach, which accounts for most of the improvement in lead quality.

I am not sure sales has changed as much as marketing though and maybe it’s time for a shift.  Selling is still largely a game of numbers, of following a process and shots on goal.  The sales process has a lot in common with baking a cake though the real baking process often has more predictable results.

No matter how much technology sales people adopt it seems there is always too much work to do, too many meetings — too many balls to keep in the air.  The journey through a typical quarter starts out with a big pipeline that winnows down to a select group to close at the end.

Very often the decision whether to forecast a deal or not is based on gut instinct — how long the sales process has been going on and even the need to beef up the numbers.  It would be better if sales could, like marketing before it, apply specific technologies to improve the processes most important to the mission.  Today we have an assortment of SFA reports, spreadsheets and even some BI tools to provide insight into the sales process but the results are uneven.

One of the main issues with these solutions is that they are data centric; they focus on the mountain of data generated by the sales process but they are nonetheless short on information.  How does that happen?

We tend to act like data and information are the same things but they are very different.  Data is fact but information is a conclusion drawn from data.  A customer is in stage two of a five step sales process — that’s data.  But information is knowing that a typical customer who makes a purchase stays in stage two for one week AND that this particular customer has been in stage two for twice that time.

Having sales information requires capturing more data than a typical CRM/SFA/contact management system typically captures.  Think about it, when the customer moved from stage one to stage two, the rep probably just updated a field in a database erasing what was there before.  That makes it hard to do any kind of comparison either between the customer and the vendor’s experience or even within the sales process.  For sales people stuck in a data centric paradigm, every day is Groundhog Day.

We’re always erasing data in our sales systems whether it’s quantity, close date, price, or who’s in charge.  Most of the time there’s one field per item and no way to capture change over the history of a deal.  That’s important because without history we don’t really know how or if the deal is progressing, only the status as defined by the current data and that makes sales forecasting and pipeline management very imprecise.

You might say that historic data is what notes are for and every SFA system in the world has a place to enter notes.  But notes are not machine-readable.  It is no simple task to cull through the notes of every deal to find the nuggets.  Imagine you are a sales rep working fifty deals.  Do you know the status of each deal all the time?  What about your manager who has many other reps like you to look after.  How does the manager keep up on all this?  There is no way the manager can and that’s why as the quarter rolls along, the number of deals to really pay attention to dwindles.

But imagine you have something more than spreadsheets or simple reports — imagine you have a real forecasting system that captures historic data and uses analytics to deliver information about all the deals in the pipeline.  Imagine further that because you have this system that you don’t need to remember all the details because the system will remind you of the differences.  If you do this you change your process from one that is essentially reactive to one that is proactive.  You do for sales what has already been done for marketing.

Modern technology has enabled marketing to be more reactive — after all a drip campaign is predicated on responding to a customer’s action.  But marketing was once (and still has aspects of being) much more proactive.  The shift to more reactivity has enabled marketing to focus on deals where there is real interest.

Likewise, sales has always been proactive — we make cold calls, get customers to agree to meetings and hope to qualify along the way.  But if sales could learn to be just a bit more reactive, by better understanding customer signals that are reflected in changes within the pipeline and forecast, we might get better results.

There is a great irony here — marketing and sales become more reactive and results improve.  It’s another way of saying we need to listen better by capturing all of the information given off in a sales process.

Finally, this sort of approach will enable the productivity increase that you want for sales.  It might even eliminate or at least reduce the need to add headcount every time you want to increase revenue.

Whybrow’s book is definitely relevant today though it was researched just before the social explosion of the last half decade.  But that perspective gives added weight to his observations of humans as social beings before we became economic actors.

Whybrow’s chief assertion is that Homo sapiens evolved on the savannah as highly social creatures living in small hierarchical groups that provided mutual security (both protection and food), emotional support and served as a repository of knowledge.  The time between when we lived in those small societies and today is infinitesimal in evolutionary terms and thus, one of his conclusions is that the human being performing as an economic actor today is virtually no different intellectually or emotionally from our ancestors on the savannah.

One of the big differences today is our communications reach.  Small groups of our ancestors were about the size of a soccer team or an army platoon and communication was face to face.  Social media may hugely increase the size of one’s intimate community, but it does not change our social approaches or approaches to intimacy.

This is all highly important when figuring out optimal uses of these new technologies in business.  To a high degree, businesses and individuals have very different reasons for approaching social media.  Businesses see it as a nearly frictionless way to “meet” customers and possibly sell something.  Regular people may just want to hang out and hook up.  In other words individuals seek community and for many of the same reasons that our ancestors aggregated.

We all know that modern social communities enable people to compare notes about vendors, products and services as well as to provide support for many of the vendor conundrums customers face in the marketplace.  Of course, people also approach the internet and its social communities in their new incarnations as Homo economicus but one should not assume that.

Given that slight misalignment of reasons for engaging in the social sphere, vendors are well advised to tread carefully when leveraging social communities for commerce.  Two new books by respected thought leaders in the space offer their wisdom and advice for trading in this brave new world.

In The Like Economy: How Businesses Make Money with Facebook, Brian Carter presents a primer on marketing and selling through Facebook.  While Carter does a good job covering the basics the feel of the book is like reading some marketing 101 treatise moved to social media.  The assumption seems to be that this is a tool more or less expressly for business, all other considerations not withstanding. You can read self-help styled chapters like “FaceBucks: Five Ways Businesses Achieve Profits with Facebook” and “How Not to Fall on Your Face: Six Mistakes That Block Facebook Profitability”.

Carter’s approach is all business, which is fine, provided the reader has already understood that social media is not exclusively about marketing and sales and that people can turn you off like a light.  Carter recommends many tactical things you can do to optimize your sales and marketing efforts but I would have preferred some nod to the need for listening to customers or sponsoring real community give and take that may not be directed toward buying the next shiny object but to answering questions about the current one.  In other words blending in with the natives, so to speak.

A more rounded approach comes from Chris Brogan in Google+ for Business: How Google’s Social Network Changes Everything.  At first glance, it’s funny that both authors seem to have a need to state in direct terms why the social network, which is their subject matter, is the first-best-and-only one for the assignment.  Perhaps it is an artifact of the publisher the each uses, Que.  While we’re at it, the cover designs aren’t that different either.  But I digress.

What’s useful, to me, about Brogan’s effort is the more holistic approach he takes to commerce on the Web.  Brogan starts at the beginning indirectly reminding us about some of our savannah heritage with sections like “Businesses Are Made of People, Connections Before the Sale” and How You Appear to Others.”  Most important there’s a whole chapter on Circles, those aggregations of community members that have like reasons for being in some kind of a relationship with you to start.

There’s more too, like Chapter 8 “The ‘Warm’ Sell” with sections like “Attention is a Gift” and “Make It About Them”.  I could go on but if I had my druthers Brogan’s approach, regardless of the social network I choose, would be my preferred way of getting the job done.

Like Carter book though, I would have appreciated it more if Brogan had managed to insert a bit more of community away from the sales process into his offering.  In the future of Web commerce, I doubt companies will have one community for service and another for sales and marketing.  It’s all becoming one and some of the best marketing can come from listening to and understanding a customer’s problems or issues especially if you can turn that issue into a need.  Each book is missing a discussion of the new role of the community manager and a bevy of people whose job is to listen and administer the communities.  Regardless of how frictionless this kind of commerce is, it does require work.

I think the more we regard the community as something with roots on a real savannah, the more successful we will be in the new cyber savannah.

Lithium is not the only company in the last six months to pull in sizable sums from the investment community.  Without doing much research I can name several others that have raised tens of millions of dollars in later rounds including Zuora, Marketo and Aria and there are others out there.

Not long ago it was common knowledge that SaaS or cloud companies needed less cash to get moving.  Gone were the days when a company like Salesforce.com had to spend upwards of $100 million to get people thinking about the cloud as a suitable alternative to business as usual.  But the latest news seems to be taking us back because today’s companies seem to be raising as much money as ever.

It’s true you don’t need to spend lots of moolah to define the cloud market these days but something else is demanding cash.  Companies are staying independent longer and the idea of going public is again on the minds of investors.  Over the last few years of recession and retrenchment, the IPO market was practically frozen and the only way to have a liquidity event was to sell your company to a bigger and more established company.

But also, earlier IPOs happened in relatively frothy environments in which categories and markets were still rather fluid and the companies that went public back then were less mature.  Today companies like Lithium, Marketo and Zuora are raising tens of millions of dollars to support activities like opening foreign markets with offices and staff and to flesh out product lines.  They may even be in the hunt for less mature companies that they can purchase—and all this before taking a nickel from the general public.

All this suggests that the IPOs, when they happen will be at much higher valuations and the shareholders will have reasonable expectations of profits from the newly minted public companies.

All of this may be a sign that investors, i.e. venture capitalists, are still somewhat gun shy of putting money into green startups preferring to invest in late stage companies with compelling stories and IPO event horizons that can be measured in months rather than years.  Many have investments on the books that go back to the Bush administration’s first term and their investors are understandably interested in liquidity also.

So Lithium’s news is as interesting for what it says about that company and its social CRM marketplace as it is for what it tells us about the investment market and where we are in it.