Twitter Changes Landscapes

Great article in today’s New York Times reviewing Twitter’s growing importance of a real time news source with its non stop flow of information feeds. Twitter has even been used to organize protests in Iran.
read article

New Friends

We been selected to develop a suite of e-commerce solutions for My Storytime Friends®, an integrated toy-and-storybook product line targeted at the 3 – 8 age group. My Storytime Friends® is the brainchild of managing partner Bruce deMustchine and the first offering from the newly formed de Sales Group LLC, which was established by Bill York, former President of the Vermont Teddy Bear company, and Danny Dimont, the former Senior Vice President of Applause Plush.

FFP Global will develop and manage integrated order capture, order management and order fulfillment platforms along with building Web 2.0 applications for My Storytime Friends®. In addition, FFP Global will host reseller and customer portals. FFP Global will handle product fulfillment from our Westborough, Massachusetts Fulfillment Center and provide customer service support at our Fairhaven, Massachusetts Contact Center.

The My Storytime Friends® product line centers on an interactive stuffed toy and storybook kit featuring a 13-inch plush animal that also appears as the main character in the accompanying 32-page, illustrated hardcover book. The books are written by veteran children’s author Andrew Wolfendon, winner of numerous awards for excellence in educational writing for children.

Call Center Outsourcing: A Strategic Connection

The benefit most often cited about outsourcing call center services is that it enables companies to better focus on their core competencies. However, FFP Global believes this is a very incomplete, if not flawed assessment as it suggests that customer interactions do not have strategic implications. Today, a customer interaction in all its forms, whether an inbound phone call, web chat or email exchange, can have a profound multiplier effect and bottom line impact when these experiences good or bad instantly traverse online media and social networking spaces and pick up a life of their own.

Thinking BPO Strategically

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), in which firms turn over  back-office functions and customer-facing (order processing, customer support) activities to outside vendors has been traditionally promoted as a way for companies to rid themselves of high volume transactions,  thus allowing them to focus on their core competencies.

At FFP Global we are seeing an interesting evolution with BPO. Because of the depth and unpredictability of the economic crisis, companies are making far reaching cuts in personnel, infrastructure, programs and capital expenditures. However, as company resources are eliminated, the ability for executives to understand transformative options can become significantly hindered.

Over the last few months, more and more FFP Global clients are relying on us to review business processes in a strategic framework context.  There’s a realization that core competencies can evaporate if they don’t have a push/pull relationship with business processes.  We believe that tremendous strategic value can be found in the elements and details of business processes, so FFP Global welcomes this development.

Diversity Recognition

DiversityBusiness.com, recently named FFP Global to their Top 100 Woman Owned Business in Massachusetts (#6) and Top 50 Diversity Owned Business in Massachusetts (#11)

Client Exposure

Today’s Wall Street Journal highlighted a product offering from TheGreenOffice.com, a new client of ours.  The product featured is biodegradable Spudware made from potato starch.

FFP Global provides fulfillment and inventory management services for TheGreenOffice.com.  In addition, we just started running outbound marketing programs for them.

It’s always great to see our clients get recognized for their innovations.

World Worth

Over the past year, the world economy has shifted gears, going from robust growth to one of economic turmoil.  Prospersous countries like Iceland suddenly faced bankruptcy.  Companies that were instituions for decades, literally lost tens of billions of market value overnight and some went out of business. Currently, many other big companies are seeking government help in order to survive. 

During a 2-3 week period, the  average person saw their savings evaporate by 30-50%. Phrases like “financial crisis” now populate the news on a nightly basis. 

On the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal, an article details the challenges that Sheldon Adelson, who is Chairman of the Sands Corp faces. Over the past year the value of his ownership stake (70%) in the company has fallen from $36.4 billion in October 2007 to about $1.3 billion now. Even when the very wealthy have financial problems, it can be a cause of concern among the general populous.

As these events take place, it can be quite depressing. But at the same time, life still goes on. The growing population of the world has a long list of basic unmet needs – from healthcare, to energy, to education. People are still shoping, going to the doctor, and meeting up with friends. Many businesses although they could be a bit busier, are doing just fine.  We need to keep perspective that we haven’t lost everything.

When there are problems, there are enormous opportunities to set new priorities that can make a world’s worth of difference.

Our Green Initiatives

Energy Conservation, precious resources, water quality and air pollution.  Not a typical agenda  list for an outsourced provider of business services, but every workday each of our staff makes countless decisions that relate to these issues.

Many of these choices are small – whether to print that email or simply read it and save it.  Others are more substantial – whether to install energy-efficient lighting at one of our facilities.  In many cases as we carry out our daily activities, we are making an environmental statement if not impact - for better or worse.

With this in mind, FFP Global has been implementing a variety of environmentally responsible initiatives in an effort to make a positive impact on the environment.

FFP Global has already taken the following steps toward this initiative:

• Office paper recycling bins have been placed throughout the facilities and will be collected either by custodial staff or by FFP employees themselves and those recyclable paper items maintained separate from refuse for pickup.
• Bins for beverage bottles and cans are conveniently located at all FFP Global facilities for recyclable plastic, glass and returnable bottles. Returnable bottles in our Westborough location are donated to the local fire department youth auxillary for their ongoing fundraising efforts
• Corrugated cardboard in all of our fulfillment centers is collected and recycled.
• Office, breakroom, and cleaning supply purchases are made with “green” vendors and/or green manufacturers whenever possible.
• Warehouse lighting in our Westborough fulfillment center has been replaced with energy efficient light fixtures that have motion sensors which eliminate wasted energy.
• We are in the process of replacing all florescent lighting with more energy efficient compact florescent tubes in Call Centers and offices on both coasts.

FFP Global is encouraging all of our employees to actively engage in these and future efforts to show the community that FFP Global is environmentally responsible. Not only will this program reduce the amount of trash going to landfills, but it will also help preserve natural resources.

Short Messages

Much has been made of Barack Obama using text messaging to announce his Vice President selection. It was estimated that 2.9 million text messages went out – representing one of the largest mobile marketing events to date.

The Obama campaign has been aggressively using emerging communication technologies and applications such as SMS, Social Networks and Email. For many young people (a key Obama target), who don’t have landline phones, being connected means having a mobile device on them at all time. Accordingly, Obama’s technology push is very much a necessity.

Text Messaging or Short Message Service (abbreviated as SMS) means the transmission of short text messages to and from a mobile phone, fax machine and/or IP address. Messages must be no longer than 160 alpha-numeric characters and contain no images or graphics.

The reason SMS was late to takeoff in the United States was the incompatibility between carriers, so if you wanted to sent a text to an AT&T subscriber if you were a T Mobile subscriber, it wouldn’t work.

Gas Prices and Ecommerce

Over one-half of respondents to an April 2008 Piper Jaffray study selected rising gas prices as an incentive to increase online buying, while slightly less than one-half (48%) cited lower prices as a reason for making Web purchases.