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Sales of Microsoft’s first Surface tablet  have started “modestly,” CEO Steve Ballmer has conceded, though the outspoken exec is confident that demand will surge when the Surface Pro drops in early 2013. Having previously been bombastic about Surface’s appeal to the market, Ballmer was apparently more taciturn in an interview with French newspaper Le Parisien . The CEO did not give exact figures for Surface sales, and instead shifted the focus to the upcoming Surface Pro. That will be a “high end” and “unique” product, Ballmer said, pointing to the higher-resolution Full HD display; Surface Pro will also run the full version of Windows 8, as opposed to Windows RT on the existing tablet. It’s Windows RT that could well be leading to Surface confusion at present, with the OS and hardware attempting to straddle the divide between content consumption and content creation. On the one hand, Windows RT lacks backward-compatibility for existing Windows apps, and can only download software cre...

  Posted on May 7, 2012 by ReadWriteWeb in Business & Marketing , Featured , Social Media Here’s a statistic that may make you do a double take: Pinterest (which is still in beta) sends more referral traffic than Twitter despite having a user base only seven percent as large as the microblogging service’s numbers. That was one of the findings in a study released last Wednesday by Eloqua as part of a product launch, which also found that Pinterest is responsible for as much referral traffic as Facebook despite having just 1% of the user base of the social media heavyweight. Taken together, it’s just more proof that Pinterest is the next [insert name of big Web 2.0 success story], at least in terms of referral traffic, although we may have to wait a while before we know if Pinterest can actually generate revenue. But does referral traffic mean you should push your brand on Pinterest, post haste? “It’s never about more traffic referral meaning more value (at least not for my clien...

Every week as SmallBizLady , I conduct interviews with experts on my Twitter talk show # SmallBizChat . The show takes place every Wednesday on Twitter from 8-9pm ET. This is excerpted from my recent interview with Brent Leary @ BrentLeary . Brent is Co-founder and Partner of CRM Essentials LLC, a CRM consulting and advisory firm focused on small and mid-size enterprises. CRM Essentials has trained thousands of business people on the benefits of best practices of implementing CRM strategies and technologies. For more information check out www.brentleary.com SmallBizLady: Why are people saying customer service is the new marketing today? Brent Leary: As noted in an August 2011 Forrester Research paper, “The traditional view of customer service is blurring into all areas of the customer life cycle.  Savvy eBusiness leaders recognize the growing alignment of service, sales, marketing, and brand to engage customers in an ‘un-fractured’ customer conversation.”   But a recent study from Ma...