Social Network Contacts and Followers - Like a Bag of Marbles?

A friend said something to me over the weekend that struck a cord. He said, "I've got all these LinkedIn contacts but I've never gotten anything from them." I thought it was interesting that he felt if he collected a bunch of contacts, a miraculous event would occur. I replied to his comment with, "contacts are not like marbles; you don't collect them for collecting's sake. You need to collect contacts so that you can leverage them to glean information from them." Social networking applications are ripe with sub-applications such as Quick-Polls, Surveys and Online Presentations; all with the ability to have your contacts participate and comment. Use these applications to help you gather information to assist you with on-the-job research and other business knowledge. In other words, make sure you play with your marbles.

A Printer Manufacturer talks about a Campaign Manager Solution?

Just saw a brief clip on WhatTheyThink.com regarding campaign management tools. The speaker was Kodak's Aaron Tavakoli. He's the Kodak Product Manager for their Insite product family of solutions. I'm seeing more and more of the major print manufacturers opening up to non-print equipment solutions. I believe you'll begin to see a few of the major print manufacturers migrating a large portion of their revenue streams into more software solution sales. After a while, the technology of the presses becomes so subtle that these companies need to differentiate themselves in ways other than a "my press is bigger than your press" type of mind-set. Manufacturer's software and customer service solutions are going to be the money makers in the near future. Imagine buying a digital press like you would a cellphone and only paying for the services it integrates itself with. Who knows, maybe one day you'll find yourself buying a press for $19.99 with a two year contract. What do you think?