Ronald Brown is a successful startup CEO with an extensive background in technology and consumer marketing. His new book, Anticipate. The Architecture of Small Team Innovation and Product Success is available via iTunes, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo.

The subject of finding customers is one of the most mysterious in business development. I’m often asked how the most successful companies do it, maybe in the hope that there’s a secret or shortcut to success. Sorry to say, no silver bullet exists.

Even with large budgets, customer discovery is more art than science. Below are the five basic steps. The most important aspect of this process is to be very methodical in your approach. Knowing where you’ve been is the only way to improve and repeat successes. Pay close attention to the details and record everything in a consistent format.

1. Classification Structure

The first step is to decide on a classification structure, better known as segmentation. You might have a product in mind, or a general concept, but sometimes, you might just be fishing — looking for a problem to solve in a market that seems attractive. That’s OK. Market segmenters are detectives.

What makes a market attractive? Maybe you see alignment with your idea or product. Or, maybe something about a segment strikes a chord and gets your creative juices flowing, knowing what you know about your company’s capabilities. Also, segment size is important: Why waste time if long-term financial gains aren’t possible?

The segment selection process can be intuitive, based on personal experience, or it can be driven by highly sophisticated segmentation tools that carve up the total market into standardized groups. (Lots of companies start with Standard Industrial Classification codes (SIC codes), a system for tracking the entire economy, managed by the U.S. Census Bureau.) Either way, at this point, you are simply making educated guesses about which ones might be a fit. You have no idea if the fit will materialize.

In emerging industries, segmentation can evolve quickly. When the iPad was first introduced, tablets were tablets. Then ereaders became a distinct category vs. general purpose. Then pricing tiers emerged. Now, industry analysts are breaking the market up into broad stroke vertical applications — education, health care, etc. — which will get subdivided further very soon.

2. Hypothesis Testing

With your evaluation structure in place, you now need to determine, one segment at a time, if there is really an opportunity you can address. You dig deeper from a research standpoint, paying particular attention to competitive offerings. Again, there’s a range of tools you can use. A consumer products company might do a formal, quantitative study, and a company selling to enterprises might set up personal meetings with senior executives. Major consulting firms, like McKinsey & Co. or the Boston Consulting Group, rely heavily on in-depth, one-on-one interviews in all of their projects. I’m working on a project in the tablet business right now, and you’d be amazed at how much you can learn from resellers.

What are you looking for? You’re identifying customer problems. They should be big ones — “pain points.” If a problem isn’t urgent and important, it’ll be difficult to create a meaningful competitive advantage. At the same time, you’re looking to see how your solution solves the problem. Is it dramatically better? Is it “demonstrable” (a very helpful ingredient when it comes to being socialized)?

If you’ve found a pain point in a large market you can address and there are no competitors (yes, it happens), you’ve stumbled upon an “unmet need,” one of the holy grails of new product development.

Segment by segment, you are testing a hypothesis related to fit or alignment: that you have something of value to offer a customer group. You are not just collecting information.

You’ll discover all kinds of things at this point, from a particular segment being a complete miss, to essential product features that must be added. Hypothesis testing never stops, even after you introduce your product. In fact, the best is yet to come. Once a product is in the market, learning based on actual usage will flow in. That’s why many in the new products field go to market with a “minimally viable product.”

3. Nuance Testing

Here’s the step that’s easy to overlook. All problems have context. In other words, when customers solve problems, they are affected by circumstances associated with timing and physical surroundings, and by the nature of the task itself. As a marketer, you won’t understand context by doing a survey, conducting a focus group, or talking to senior executives.

You understand context by experiencing customer problem solving yourself. To do that, you turn to customer immersion techniques. Did you know dairy farmers use tablets? To elegantly solve their problems, you better be willing to get up at 3 a.m. on a freezing morning. Some consumer goods companies even live with customers in their homes for a short period of time. Procter & Gamble, considered one of the best marketers in the world, uses such an immersion program called “Living It.”

4. Customer Stories

Hypothesis and nuance testing findings get captured as stories. They’re much more descriptive than use cases in that they focus heavily on problem/solution decision making.

5. Solution Iteration

Tight product alignment with a customer is a matter of iteration. You put something out there (an idea, a prototype, an actual product), and you get feedback, and you go away and improve and refine. Your customer stories get more refined as well.

It’s highly unlikely that you’ll identify a pain point and address it perfectly in one fell swoop. In fact, to even try is highly risky, especially if you’re building hardware.

Most of the time and money wasted in new product development is related to late-stage rework, but you can avoid it by developing in small steps, ever tightening the alignment. This is what agile development is all about, and why it’s gaining so much in popularity in and outside Silicon Valley.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, pixdeluxe

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Ekaterina Walter is a social media strategist at Intel. She is a part of Intel’s Social Media Center of Excellence and is responsible for company-wide social media enablement and corporate social networking strategy. She was recently elected to serve on the board of directors of WOMMA.

Online presentation website SlideShare is an important business network that ranks in the top 300 websites, with 30 million monthly viewers, and 80 million pageviews. Users upload presentations, Word and PDF files, tag them, and share them on other social media sites, or embed them in their blogs and company websites.

But SlideShare isn’t just a one-way process: The social functions in the site are giving companies the potential to connect with customers and clients in new ways, generating new business and enhancing their online image.

Here’s how businesses achieve social success using SlideShare.

1. Tell Your Story

For organizations of all sizes, presentations can communicate a company’s ethos far beyond the more traditional LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook routes alone. Presentations make a company more three-dimensional and add personality.

In May 2011 NASA launched its NASA Universe channel on SlideShare, which integrated presentations, documents and videos from NASA headquarters and field centers. In the announcement on the SlideShare blog, NASA social media manager Stephanie Schierholz said, “SlideShare provides us another great way to share our content in new ways and new places with the goal of inspiring and interesting people in the universe.”

Because presentations are generally about very specific topics, companies use SlideShare for inbound marketing, to generate traffic through clients’ and customers’ searches. By sharing SlideShare links, it’s possible to optimize searches by tagging presentations and using the SlideShare profile to link back to the company website.

2. Highlight Your Experts

IBM Expert Network is a set of channels that leverages the thought leadership of employees across the company to gain social media engagement. It showcases the latest thinking, research, inspiration videos and more.

3 and 4. Demand Generation and Social Cross-Pollination

We’ve all heard it: What gets measured gets funded. But tracking awareness metrics is one thing; measuring lead capture is something else entirely. Eloqua has an active and creative SlideShare channel – so creative, in fact, that SlideShare features Eloqua’s channel as an example of an effective Platinum page. Through Eloqua’s SlideShare Cloud Connector, the company automatically populates its demand generation database with profile information from anyone who completes a form on its SlideShare channel. It’s one of the ways companies are bringing together social media with demand generation.

Another thing that jumps out about the channel is its social network cross-pollination. The company highlights links to its Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube communities right under the channel description.

5. Share In-Depth Information

An increasing number of companies are using SlideShare to present financial, technical or other in-depth information that can be difficult to represent on their websites using more traditional tools, such as graphs and text. This enables businesses to connect with potential clients in a whole new way.

Pfizer uses SlideShare to post its financial reporting and other presentations, which allow interested parties to access information in a user-friendly format.

6. Spark Conversations

Brand management company 1000 Heads specializes in managing what others say about brands. The company uses SlideShare’s social tools and community section to spark conversations with users who comment on, embed or share presentations from their clients, which helps them to reach and engage whole new audiences.

7. Upscale exposure

If a webinar or conference presentation reached only a few thousand people in its original format, posting online through SlideShare can create a multiplier effect. Distilled‘s Tom Critchlow initially presented a webinar to a few thousand people, but after posting on SlideShare, received over 30,000 views.

Have you used SlideShare? Do you find it a visually pleasing and useful tool?

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Now that we’ve been floating around in the digital ether for a few years, what have we learned? How has cloud computing affected company bottom lines? Has it really made operations “greener?” Why do most companies move into the cloud in the first place?

Business technology company CSC commissioned a survey of IT decision makers in eight countries to find out the motivations behind their move to cloud computing systems and its effects on their businesses. The data they distilled might surprise you, and it’s all packed neatly into the infographic below.

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Who drives product innovation? The answer is small, entrepreneurial development teams — better known as “agile teams” in the high-tech industry.

These types of teams are obviously essential for startups, but many large companies approach team-building in the same way, especially those that lead the industry in terms of product revenue. This is not to say the corporation doesn’t play a crucial role — it most certainly does — but mostly by creating an environment for success, by removing obstacles, setting a clear vision and providing essential tools and training.

What are the essential elements — the genetic structure, if you will — of a high-performance team? After poring through 60 years of industry research and talking to dozens of companies, I’ve identified 10 core innovation strategies of new product leaders.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, francisblack

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This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

UK retailers are losing more than £8 billion ($12.6 million USD) per year due to website inefficiencies, according to research by data and analytics firm QuBit.

Using its Exit Feedback technology, QuBit collected more than 18,000 comments about a range of UK retail websites and analyzed the data to discover the major issues that these sites face.

Mashable spoke with QuBit CEO Graham Cooke about the company’s research, and what it means for businesses. We looked at the top 10 reasons website visitors don’t convert to paying customers on retail websites and offer a few tips for businesses that face these problems.

Top 10 Problem Areas for Conversion

Here are the top 10 website issues that hinder retail website visitors from converting to customers, according to QuBit’s research:

• Pricing: Pricing was the leading issue for consumers in their online purchase decisions. Transparency and accessibility are key for the online retail world, since comparative shopping is drastically easier on the Internet as compared with shopping in the real world. QuBit recommends crossing out previous prices or focusing on a “deal of the week” to satisfy price-conscious consumers.
• Product descriptions: More than 12% of feedback was related to the lack of clear and complete product descriptions. Descriptions must be thorough enough to replace the knowledge of a sales associate. This is especially important for fashion retailers, as “the vast proportion of feedback found on fashion retail sites blames lack of sizing information as a primary reason for exiting the site,” the report reads. Materials used, origin of goods and sizing information are just a few details that retailers should consider listing.
• Stock information: It is important that availability of products be communicated to website visitors early on in the purchasing process. If a product is out of stock, timely information about when it will be available is also important. Otherwise, users should be given the option to be notified once the product becomes available, or the site should recommend related goods that are in stock.
• Site functionality: Users are frustrated when they enter a site with expectations of how it should function and are utterly disappointed. Key missing functionalities cited in this research included wish lists, in-store pick-up, personalized recommendations, guest checkout and product filters.
• Shipping information: Shipping prices and times should be readily available. Lack of this information is likely to cause checkout drop-offs and complete abandonment of the site, the report explained. Offering international shipping and displaying shipping prices in destination currencies are two features likely to improve this problem area.
• Images: People like to see what they’re buying before they make a purchase. High quality photography from multiple angles and with zoom capabilities is important for converting shoppers into buyers.
• Discounts: Commenters point to not being able to find where to enter discount codes as a big problem when shopping online. Likewise, consumers seemed confused as to whether offline discounts could be applied online, and if so, whether the discounts applied to their demographic or purchase. We’ve all been there — exclusion lists are lengthy and can include details on countries, states, brands and even particular items.
• Navigation: Consumers are accustomed to visiting large commerce websites, such as Amazon, that feature clear navigation — and they expect that same level of quality across all retail websites. Broken links within the shopping cart, lack of category pages in the main navigation and broken browser functionalities (such as the back button) were key issues cited by consumers.
• Video: Product videos can add flare to a product page, and apparently consumers expect them, as the lack of videos was expressed as a major problem area on retail websites. QuBit pointed to Burberry as being a trendsetter in this area, as the retailer’s website presents a seamless experience of videos and photos.
• Website speed: Slow loading times are of huge concern to retailers, as consumers simply hate waiting around for a website to finally show up. Retailers should benchmark their load times against those of their competitors and act accordingly.

Tips for Improvement

QuBit CEO and ex-Googler Graham Cooke told us that there are three main things that a retail website owner needs to look at in order to improve conversions:

• Product information: “Are the descriptions on your site clear, concise and engaging? Do they tell the user what they need to know about a product? Have you got great images on the site and do you let people zoom in so they can really get the detail? The product information on a website plays the role of the store assistant in an offline store, so you want to make sure its performing at its best.”
• Payment processes: “The checkout is one of the most likely areas where you’re going to lose customers, and there are some really simple things you can do to make this work better. Lots of retailers ignore really simple things, like enabling the display of payment information in multiple currencies or making sure that people have clear information about shipping costs.”
• User experience: “We’ve all known for years that user experience is key to successful online retail, but it still pops up all the time as a major issue. Again, this can be [narrowed] down to relatively simple issues such as slow page loading speeds or site search, but they’re all costing you valuable sales.”

How does your business optimize its website for conversions? Let us know your strategies in the comments below.

Image courtesy of Flickr, turtlemom4bacon & Images of Money

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After saying she wouldn’t step down from Yahoo’s board of directors, Carol Bartz has resigned from the board.

Bartz’s role as CEO ended abruptly Tuesday when she was ousted from the position she’d held for less than three years. In an interview with Fortune later in the week, she made it clear she intended to stay on the company’s board. In the interview, she called its members “doofuses” and said they “f***ed me over.”

It appears she is no longer among them, though. According to multiple reports, Bartz’s last day on the board was Friday.

[via Bloomberg]

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Forty-five years ago, the first episode of Star Trek aired on NBC. It was five years after the Soviet Union launched the first human into space, and the franchise explored a fictional 23rd century “United Federation of Planets” through a crew based on the starship Enterprise.

Six television series and 11 movies later, some aspects of Star Trek no longer seem futuristic (people still don’t live in space, but they are working on vacationing there).

To celebrate Star Trek’s anniversary and lasting impact, we enlisted help from the “Commander” of international Star Trek fan association Starfleet, Dave Blaser.

He and a handful of other Trekkies helped us point out these eight Star Trek technologies that have shifted from future fantasy to present reality.

1. The Flip Phone

While on away missions, the Star Trek crew often speaks through hand-held “communicators” that look like walkie talkies with a flip top — in other words, much like a clamshell mobile phone.

The likeness inspired Motorola in 1996 to name the first flip phone “StarTAC.”

It also caused some strife for Trekie Ted Anthony, who wrote in a 2006 article for the AP: “Once, when I was 6, the teenage son of one of my father’s colleagues fashioned me a handmade communicator out of a wood block, paint and chickenwire. A few months later, I left it in an airplane bathroom as we flew to Asia and caused something of a bomb scare.”

2. The iPad

Throughout Star Trek: The Next Generation, touch-based control panels called PADDs (personal access display devices) were frequently used by crew members. They resemble the tablet-like computers of today.

According to Ars Technica, PADDs were partly a reflection of a constricted budget. The flat surface of the devices meant that no knobs or dials needed to be constructed, and the idea of that its software could be reconfigured to complete any task made it a flexible prop.

No actual code was written for the devices in Star Trek, but CBS Interactive created an iPad app that mimicks its interface.

3. Bluetooth Headsets

Photo source: Wikipedia

Uhura, for a time the Enterprise’s Communications officer, wears a giant silver earpiece while sitting at the communications station. This reminds Blaser and others of the bluetooth headpieces of today.

“Look at anyone walking down the street looking like they’ve gone insane and are talking to themselves and you’re likely to see a blue light flashing next to their ear and, looking closer, you’ll see the Bluetooth earpiece.”

4. Tricorders

In Star Trek, “tricorders” are handheld devices used for sensor scanning, data analysis and recording data.

A company called Vital Technologies intentionally replicated it in the mid-90s with a device that it called the TR-107 Mark 1. Like its fictional counterpart, the device included several scientific functions such as an electromagnetic field meter, thermometer, barometer and light meter.

According to Blaser, the company sold about 10,000 of these units before it went out of business.

More recent efforts at replicating the device include a Tricoder Android app that was taken down earlier this month after CBS cried infringement and a $10 million contest by the X-Prize foundation for a Tricorder-like medical diagnostic device.

5. The Floppy Disk and USB Drives

Star Trek foresaw the convenience of portable digital storage.

“On Star Trek, they were the small square coloured pieces of plastic that they inserted into various computer consoles, but in the 80s and 90s we had the 3.5-inch floppy disk that was remarkably close to the same size as those pieces of plastic that they had on Star Trek,” Blaser says.

“Later, in Star Trek: The Next Generation, they had isolinear chips that could hold gigabytes upon gigabytes of data. These days, you don’t see floppy disks being used but USB flash drives which are, incidentally, pretty close to the same size that Star Trek TNG showed the isolinear chips were.”

6. Voice Activation

When Scotty meets an at-the-time-of-filming modern computer, he’s confused when it doesn’t respond to his voice as the Enterprise computers do. Today, he might have had more luck. Many computer softwares, smartphones, cars and other electronics now have voice activation options.

7. GPS

While the transporter above is from the 2009 Star Trek movie, well after GPS was invented, its predecessors were also able to locate crew members with precision before beaming them up. The U.S. government declared GPS functional in 1995 after launching 27 Earth-orbiting satellites — about 30 years after the concept appeared in Star Trek for the first time.

8. Diagnostic Bed

Dr. McCoy’s medical diagnostic bed inspired a team of scientists at the University of Leicester to create a sickbay that observes patients for early signs of diseases using monitoring equipment such as thermal imaging technology and analysis of the patient’s breath.

A scientist who worked on the project called a “first step” to achieving the sci-fi technology.

Obviously, some of the gadgets in Star Trek were based on science fiction staples established long before 1966 (If you’re interested in the original origins of some of these gadgets, click here). But Star Trek is somewhat of a gold mine of once-futuristic technology and inspiration.

“The list can go on and on and on about various things that have been inspired by Star Trek,” Blaser says. “Even people have been inspired by Star Trek and have gone on to do great things. Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield and American Astronaut Mae Jamieson were both Star Trek fans.”

Let us know about some of your favorite Star Trek gadgets in the comments below.

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Relative to other forms of communication, though, it hasn’t changed all that much. In fact, most of the changes have been merely cosmetic — most employers still require a one-sheet, black-and-white printed resume at interviews, regardless of the fact that we all use email and have had access to much better design options for years now. Not to mention, printing is unnecessary in the digital world we live in. At this point, even the role of cover letters in today’s job market is being scrutinized.

The proliferation of digital and social tools over the past decade has brought about the social media resume, the infographic resume and the video resume, among other creative options.

This infographic, created by RezScore, an online resume-grading tool, looks at the history of the resume.

What are your thoughts on the future of the resume? Let us know in the comments below, and share your creative resume while you’re at it.

Social Media Job Listings

Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we publish a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the top social media job opportunities from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!

• Social Media Manager at Shared Vision Marketing in Atlanta, GA
• Director, Social Media at Razorfish in San Francisco, CA
• Metrics/Strategic Specialists at Ignite Social Media in Birmingham, MI

More Job Search Resources From Mashable

– 6 Companies With Awesome Employee Perks
– Tips For Negotiating Employee Equity
– HOW TO: Spruce Up a Boring Resume [INFOGRAPHIC]
– HOW TO: Find and Land Freelance Work
– 9 Dynamic Digital Resumes That Stand Out From the Crowd

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AT&T has a plan to save the $39 billion T-Mobile acquisition blocked by the U.S. government, reports Reuters quoting sources familiar with the matter.

AT&T’s new plan has two parts: First, it will pledge to keep T-Mobile’s subscription plans and rates at current levels. Second, it will need to sell off up to 25% of T-Mobile’s business, potentially including airwaves and customers.

Some analysts doubt AT&T can pull off the merger. Former antitrust enforcer Bob Doyle told Reuters it would be difficult to find a buyer for parts of T-Mobile’s business in the U.S., as a sale to either Verizon or Sprint would also cause antitrust lawsuits.

Should AT&T fail to reach a settlement, it will need to pay T-Mobile’s owner Deutsche Telekom approximately $6 billion.

In a recent Mashable poll, 66.49% of readers said the U.S. government was right to block the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, 25.53% thought the government should butt out and 7.97% were unsure.

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In tablets generally and the iPad particularly, consumers have found a device conducive to reading news.

It’s no surprise then that a growing number of newsreading apps have appeared, from individual, branded apps such as the Wall Street Journal for iPad to independent apps such as Flipboard, Editions and Zite, which are designed for consuming content from a variety of sources.

The last of these was acquired by CNN Tuesday. In an emailed statement, CNN’s general manager of digital, KC Estenson, suggested that Zite will continue to work with a wide array of media partners and that its technology will also be leveraged “to help CNN’s websites and apps serve more personalized content, making our current digital services even better.”

Zite would continue to operate as an independent company on a day-to-day basis under existing CEO Mark Johnson, the statement said.

Still, we were left with many questions. Why Zite? Will it truly remain independent? Will the new subsidiary be free to strike partnerships with other media outlets? Will the algorithms be tweaked to feature CNN content more prominently?

These are some of the questions we posed to both Estenson and Johnson in a phone interview Tuesday afternoon, parts of which are transcribed below.

Q&A With KC Estenson, CNN & Mark Johnson, Zite

Why Zite?

Estenson: We saw in Zite a best-in-class product. It’s deeply loved by the people who have it, and we thought it would be a nice addition to our digital portfolio. Secondly, there’s great technology behind it. We’re seeing a lot of inteest in this space now, but these guys have been working on this for six years.

Johnson: The iPad is really well suited to reading. I think what’s interesting about Zite is that it brings you really interesting information you might not have otherwise read. It’s not just repackaging information.

We’re seeing Flipboard move into TV and film, while Pulse is getting into bookmarklets and extensions. Where is Zite going next?

Johnson: We still see a huge market in giving you the information most relevant to you. We’re focusing on content right now, news-type content. We really want to focus on giving people a great personalized iPad magazine.

Your competitors are striking partnerships with content publishers left and right. Are you doing the same?

Johnson: We’re certainly having a lot of conversations right now. We’re looking at ways to work with publishers to help them monetize and distribute their content. But we have nothing to announce right now.

Flipboard has recently begun displaying ads in its app. Are you planning on doing the same?

Johnson: We’re not going to rush the business model here. Part of the [attraction of] the deal was not to have unnatural pressure on Zite to deliver financially. The goal is to get a great product and the business model will follow. We can imagine a variety of ways this company can monetize itself.

And how do you plan on integrating Zite with CNN’s existing digital properties?

Estenson: Zite is going to stand alone as an independent operation. Mark will be running it in San Francisco. The development office is in Vancouver. The technology that powers Zite over time we will begin to leverage with CNN’s digital services, but it won’t be an overnight thing. But over the course of the next 18 months or so I can imagine a world where CNN starts to serve up more personally relevant content. That can help with CNN’s traffic recirculation and those sorts of things on the site. The important thing is that Zite stays.

Can we expect CNN’s content to feature more prominently on Zite in the future?

Johnson: Absolutely not. Our personalization algorithms look for most interesting content on the web, whether that comes from CNN or elsewhere. Our algorithms are completely agnostic.

Will Zite still be free to pursue partnerships with media companies beyond CNN?

Estenson: Yes. You’ll see them do a wide variety of deals. We have a lot of experience at CNN with content partnerships. The web is a really interconnected space, a lot of linking and crosslinking of articles. That same philosophy will be remixed and repurposed. You’ll see us help Zite with that in a variety of ways.

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