I was curious to take a look at my Twitter usage over time and found TweetStats, which provides graphs on usage by month, day, time of day, popular keywords, etc. Clearly, my usage (or addiction) of Twitter has steadily grown over time. I’d be curious to see how this has grown in relation to the number of followers and individuals I’m following. I’m pretty sure I’d see a fairly positive correlation between the two. Click on the graph below to see more stats.

Compiled and graphed by TweetStats

My Most Popular Tags

Created using Wordle

I’m about to move out of my apartment and I’ve been on the hunt for where I will end up next. With work and school, I haven’t had a lot of time to drive and look around for a new place but I have been able to check out a lot of places via the web.

Here are the tools I’ve been using:

Craigslist
If you haven’t heard of Craigslist by now, you’ve probably been living under a rock. Craigslist is an online provider of classified ads. The website lists items for sale and purchase from cities all over the world. I’m looking for another apartment so I’ve been searching http://reno.craigslist.org/apa/ for something within my price range.

Google Street View
When I find a place I like on Craigslist, I pop the address into Google Maps and pull up the street view option to get another perspective on the property and its surroundings.

Twitter
You never know what opportunities your friends may know about. I have been reminding my followers on Twitter that I’m looking for a new place to live and have had a few people respond with available options in their neighborhood.

Zillow
If you’re looking to actually buy or sell a house or condo, Zillow provides you with a few handy tools. First off, they provide an interactive map via Microsoft Virtual Earth that allows you to interact with properties that are currently for sale or have sold recently. The map shows estimates for each of these properties and can help in valuing your property. Second, Zillow can provide you with a Zestimate, which is a valuation of your property based on the data they have on similar properties nearby.

Keep in mind, while there are a lot of cool resources online, you can find some pretty cool deals out there the old fashioned way by hopping in your car and driving around.

Kingsley Joseph asked an interesting question on Twitter today that had me thinking about optimizing business processes:

“what does CRM mean to you? most definitions I find on the web are next to useless”
Kingsley2

He had quite a few responses, mine was as follows:

“@kingsley I would define CRM as any system used to manage customer touchpoints and value derived from those interactions-products/email/etc”
colinloretz

My response to Kingsley was very short. It had to be in order to stay within the 140 character limit of Twitter. As he pointed out in his reply, Twitter’s restraint can be useful for receiving a clear definition of a complex system like CRM, which if you haven’t decoded it yet, is customer relationship management usually applied to customer relationship management software. If you Google “CRM” or its expanded form, you’ll find all sorts of definitions, each one more convoluted than the last. It doesn’t need to be complex.

Customers provide a business with value. Using a grocery store as an example, optimizing touchpoints, anywhere a business and customer interact, can increase variables such as how many times a customer visits the store or how much they spend during each trip, resulting in a higher customer lifetime value.

Some other responses to Kingsley’s questions included:

“CRM is philosophy & strategy that puts the customer at the center, maximizing long-term value for both customer and business”
Gokubi

“CRM requires concrete, measurable goals and clear reporting to validate increasing ‘value.’”
dschach

“CRM is a philosophy & a business strategy, supptd.by a system & technology, designed to improve human interactions in a biz. environment”
pgreenbe

And at a very high level, which probably falls in line with many company mission statements:

“CRM will help you save the world…if that’s what you want to do.”
Gokubi

I spend a lot of time developing solutions using Salesforce.com, customer relationship software that is offered using a monthly software-as-a-service model. Many people would probably argue that being a programmer, knowledgeable in Javascript, HTML and Salesforce’s own Apex code, a derivative of Java, is all you need to develop solutions for the platform. An education in computer science will prepare most programmers for the type of logic that is needed in day-to-day business scenarios. Many businesses could actually benefit from a programmatic approach to business. In fact, applying principles from open source and agile development philosophies to business can have amazing results. That discussion is for another article.

Software can help a business but technology should not be thrown at a problem to make it go away. In most of the businesses I’ve worked with, there have always been real world processes to optimize before implementing the technology.

Real world experience can be one of the best teachers, but adding textbook learning from areas like Six Sigma or project management to a developer’s skill set will allow a small team, or even an individual, to optimize a business that can be further supported by technology like Salesforce.com or Microsoft Sharepoint.