If you’re already using a current version of ACT! from [tag]Sage Software[/tag], sorry, I can’t help you–you’re already in hell. If you’re considering ACT!, run away quickly. This is a product with so many lethal problems for users, developers have told me the number-one add-on purchased by users is a utility to export their data in order to roll back to an older version. In fact, the developers I spoke with couldn’t stop the stream of anecdotes about data problems, support debacles, and a business approach that has turned Sage’s development and user community against them. There has been a consumer class-action lawsuit filed against Sage by end-users in a U.S. District Court in Georgia, charging “deceptive, unlawful conduct in designing, manufacturing, distributing and supplying” ACT! 7.0. Sage Software is the company that also manufactures SalesLogix, however that product is primarily sold and supported by third party vendors. 

I’ve used ACT! for a number of years, and have frequently run into issues caused by bad programming and database development. I had to rely on outside developers to create tools that would help me manage my customer lists by exporting data to Access or SQL where I could actually run sophisticated queries. Recently I fell for the hype about ACT!’s upgrade to .NET and SQL, and downloaded a trial version to check it out. It seemed marginally better, until I started trying to use some of the email features and discovered it wouldn’t meet my needs. No problem. I just walked away from the trial.

Not so fast.

After my trial ran out, I realized with some horror that when I had loaded the ACT! email client, it had downloaded two months of my email from my server. It was now locked up in ACT! and I couldn’t get it out. When I called customer service to find out how to access and export my email, they told me they don’t support the trial version, and I’d have to buy a support package. When I called the developers I used to rely on to make ACT! work, they told me they won’t touch the new version of ACT!, and are only working on tools for the large pool of users stranded on the ACT!6 ice floe.

With all the tools that are out there for handling CRM and SFA, do yourself a favor and find a company that stands behind its products, respects the developer community, and understands the concept of customer service. Sage is not that company, and you can confirm that charge by calling any of the many 3rd party companies that create add-ons for ACT!.

Following the acquisition of web analytics firm Sane Solutions last year, [tag]Unica[/tag] launched Affinium NetInsight, an enterprise web analytics solution to round out its line up of enterprise marketing management solutions. In the seven months since NetInsight was added to the Affinium suite, it’s been gaining a lot of momentum as a turnkey web analytics solution with a reputation for ease of use and powerful reporting.

Last week, NetInsight was selected by Reed Business Information, one of the largest publishers of industry journals in the U.S., which followed directly on the heels of NetInsight’s ranking among top analytics vendors by JupiterResearch.

Among the strengths cited by Jupiter, NetInsight offers an open and flexible analytics solution, that dovetails with the rest of the Affinium suite to offer “a complete enterprise marketing management solution,” that helps companies manage brand, relationship and internet marketing, including campaign planning and budgeting, prject management, execution and measurement. As a complete suite Affinium includes cross-channel lead and campaign management, marketing resource management, and web and customer analytics.

There’s a lot of competition in the analytics space, but ease of use and integration with a complete EMM solution are paying off for Unica. Affinium can be purchased as point solutions or as a suite, and can be managed onsite or as a hosted service.

[Disclosure:] I have been writing as an unpaid guest blogger for Unica’s Marketing Consortium blog on the topic of Social Media.

[tag]Qwikker[/tag] is a content distribution platform for mobile phones, enabling the discovery, downloading and sharing of a wide variety of content, including music, videos, games, ringtones, coupons, and text content. What’s interesting about the platform is that it can serve up content from Web to phone, phone to phone, and also from fixed location to phone, which provides a lot of options for engaging consumers in creative ways.

Qwikker received a Global Mobile Award at this year’s 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, on the basis of an advertising campaign by Virgin Mobile that used fixed locations at a music festival to serve up free music and video downloads to mobile phone users via bluetooth. Out of 70,000 festival-goers, nearly 30,000 accessed one of 33 Bluetooth servers, or “jacks”, stationed throughout the festival grounds and promoted by posters, flags and stickers. With traffic reporting and analytics, Virgin was able to track the popularity not only of downloaded content, but of physical locations throughout the festival. More than 12,000 users opted in to the campaign, and nearly 5,000 downloaded content.

In addition to 700 physical locations in bars, movie theaters, malls and transportation stations in the U.S. and U.K., Qwikker also provides Qwikker Channels, a free java-based client for mobile handsets that enables delivery of branded on-demand content through any available connection, including Bluetooth, WAP and SMS.

Qwikker is funded by Sequoia Capital, Enterprise Venture Partners, and TeliaSonera. They maintain a blog that provides a useful inside view on their corner of the mobile marketing space.

With the 3GSM World Congress underway in Barcelona this week, there’s a lot of focus on mobile marketing. Successful and highly visible mobile campaigns from companies like Nike and Virgin have shown the viability of creative brand marketing to mobile handsets, without serving up spam.

One company at the forefront of mobile marketing is [tag]Enpocket[/tag],  one of a growing breed of hybrid agency/technology businesses that mash up marketing services with proprietary applications to deliver sophisticated and savvy campaigns. Typical agencies don’t have the engineering skills to provide a strong marketing platform, and typical engineering shops don’t have the marketing skills to serve up smart campaigns.  Enpocket seeks to bridge the gap, with a single-minded focus on mobile marketing.

In addition to creative campaign services, Enpocket offers technology for mobile advertising, promotional marketing, personalization, peer-to-peer mobile applications, behavioral analytics, and campaign management and reporting. Clients include Pepsi, Panasonic, Expedia and Snapple, while carrier partners include Sprint, Orange, Vodafone and Verizon.  

Engadget’s CEO, Mike Baker, has a useful article offering 10 Tips for Going Mobile over at the Mobile Marketing Association, a vendor-backed mobile industry group. I’ve been critical about the MMA in the past, because of their failure to stand up for mobile consumers on issues like spam. Ignoring the concerns of the consumers that form your market is not a wise bet for an industry group in a world of advancing social media. But this article by Enpocket is worth a read, as are some of the other materials on the MMA site. Too bad that in all the time the MMA has been around, they still can’t seem to come up with anything to say in their consumer section other than, um, “coming soon”.

The Web’s most ubiquitous presentation medium is getting a new boost in 3D imaging from an open source group calling themselves [tag]Papervision3D[/tag]. Their 3D engine, also called Papervision, works with the Flash 8 Image API to render convincing 3D environments without requiring end-users to download or install an additional plugin.

While no one is yearning for a return to the days of superfluously sexy Flash intros for corporate Web sites, 3D rendering holds a lot of promise for product demonstrations and rich application interfaces–especially in the context of near-universal browser compatibility.

Click on the rhino to view a demo using the latest version of Papervision, or visit Papervision.org to see a variety of 3D Flash samples.

Leveraging its experience in business process analytics, [tag]HardMetrics[/tag] has announced the release of Marketing Performance Manager (MPM), a  marketing analytics application designed to be managed by marketing end-users without dependence on IT. MPM’s “self-service” application promises to help marketers execute closed-loop marketing programs by rapidly correlating campaign performance with sales and financial data. MPM’s outcome analysis would help marketers analyse and refine campaign performance and demonstrate marketing’s contribution to company revenue and profitabiliy.

Amid a growing field of marketing dashboards and analytics tools, HardMetrics’ value proposition is “eliminating at least 80% of the time, effort and cost involved in closed-loop marketing.” This is acheived through HardMetrics’ “codeless implementation” which allows marketers themselves to input data sources, define dashboards, scorecards and reports, and drill down into data analysis. HardMetrics approaches integration across departments and data sources by eliminating many of the complex steps required to migrate and transform data, and processing data as close to the source as possible, which eases integration and maintains data quality.

HardMetrics MPM offers marketing dashboards, scorecards, reports and alerts drawn from any marketing campaign management platform, or other data source, including the ubiquitous Excel spreadsheet. The application will capture response rates, open rates, lead scoring, event attendance, click-through rates, conversion, as well as any user-defined metrics. It also enables an automatic roll-up of individual campaign metrics into broader Key Performance Indicators.

The software is offered as both an installed application and a hosted service.

[tag]ClipSyndicate[/tag] announced the beta launch of their updated video publishing platform today, which enables the easy syndication of video content for Web site publishers and content providers. If you’re a video content provider, you can reach a larger audience of viewers through online syndication of your content, and if you’re a Web site publisher, you can draw from a large source of video content to host on your site.

ClipSyndicate stores and serves the video content, delivering to your site a thumbnail image, headline and link that pops open a ClipSyndicate player. It’s not quite as seemless a user experience as serving embedded video clips directly from your site, but it allows ClipSyndicate to serve advertising from their player, which is apparently the foundation of their revenue model. Pricing for Web Publishers includes a  “free service” in which you share in whatever ad revenue your traffic drives, or a “paid service” in which you can extend your own ad sales by selling advertising for the ClipSyndicate network.

One useful feature of the new ClipSyndicate platform is SmartChannel, which lets you save a set of video content search parameters that you can export to an RSS reader for automatic alerts on new content, or to publish straight to your site authomatically.

 You can sign up for the beta at the ClipSyndicate site.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has just released a study (PDF) that looks at the use and implications of tagging. The study also includes an interview with David Weinberger, who discusses why tagging matters, and puts it into a broader social and business context.

The study finds that 28% of Internet users have used tags to classify content suchs as photos, blog postings or news stories. They primarily represent the “classic early adopters of technology”, meaning they’re young, wealthy and well wired. However, the study also suggests that adoption of tagging by the mainstream is likely, as popular sites like Amazon, Yahoo!, and Google are providing tools that make it easy to tag content.

Tagging has broad and significant implications for business and marketing, especially as tags become a more prominent mechanism for people to search and find content. As Weinberger points out in the Interview, tagging represents an opportunity for trusted sharing of useful information.

By searching for a tag we can find material others have discovered ahead of us… Tagging also allows social grous to form around similarities of interests and points view. If you’re using the same tags as I do, we probably share some deep commonalities.

What marketers need to understand about tagging is that it makes it easier for consumers to find public content about your company, products and competitors from their peers, and it’s a universally distributed system that is not trivial to game. While companies have gotten used to spending on SEO/SEM, this is one more trend that will force marketers to invest more time and effort considering their holistic presence in a world of social media.

Tip of the hat to Stowe Boyd.

Yesterday it was PowerReviews, today it’s [tag]Aggregate Knowledge[/tag], another venture taking concepts proven on Amazon and applying them to the wider Web. Where PowerReviews is extending consumer reviews across the Web, Aggregate Knowledge is extending what they call in Information Science “genreflecting”–in this case, making product recommendations based on shared affinities with other consumers.

Aggregate Knowledge’s various ”Discovery” products work by collecting consumer behavior in the form of clicks and purchases, and then using the data to reflect back to other consumers with similar behaviors suggestions for other products and content. It’s like the popular Amazon feature “Customers who bought this item also bought….”

According to Aggregate Knowledge’s product announcement at Demo, their system was responsible for driving 20% of all products purchased at Overstock.com over the holiday season. But they’re not just pointing their engine at online retail, they’re also addressing online media, with more targetted content and advertising based on identified affinities among readers.

[tag]Oracle[/tag] announced the wide release of Siebel 8 at its global “Applications Unlimited” event, the latest upgrade to an application platform that includes Siebel Sales, Siebel Enterprise Marketing, Siebel Customer Order Management, Siebel Contact Center and Service, Siebel Universal Customer Master, and Siebel Self-Service and eBilling. The key talking points of their release focus on the most common customer pain points, including integration, cost-of-ownership and ease-of-use. And of course, all of these issues are resolved “out-of-the-box” with version 8.

Oracle is promoting a short list of usability features including improved search, ability to change business rules on the fly through a drag-and-drop interface, and apparantly some kind of wizard system to guide newbies through unfamiliar tasks. But the interesting news is that Siebel 8 will apparently provide support for some of Oracle’s competing technologies, including IBM WebSphere and BEA Weblogic, and Microsoft’s SQL Server 2005 and IBM’s DB2. Siebel 8 will also support Linux, through Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux program.

It’s always fun to reverse prepackaged PR announcements. When Oracle is pumping Siebel 8’s value proposition as an easy-to-integrate, easy-to-use system that lowers total cost of ownership, does that mean they’re fighting a rep for systems that are expensive, clunky and hard to integrate? Last I remember, those were all issues people were complaining about 3 revs ago.