Enterprise Web 2.0, on Social Business and Computing

Rise of the networked Enterprise – Web 2.0 finds its payday

2011-01-09T21:10:00.002-05:00

McKinsey & Company published their yearly study of Web 2.0 adoption in the enterprise as they've done over the last few years. In addition to the interesting data and continual growth of use, they tried to use some statistical analysis to correlate the level of use and adoption to company business performance.

The results, while far from being statistically conclusive, do show that companies that have extensively adopted Web 2.0 and collaborative technologies (they prefer using the term "Networked Enterprise" to the traditional Enterprise 2.0) perform better than their less networked peers.

It's a great validation to what many of us practitioners in the field see as obvious. More information sharing, transparency and collaboration increases knowledge dissemination and empower better informed decisions. Taking these approaches out to customers and partners can only have positive effect.

Few things I found noteworthy in the results:

The ownership of internal collaboration at 61% of responding companies was in IT, not the business or corporate communications. This leads in many cases to a tool based discussion and decisions rather than how can these tools best serve business needs employee needs. Overall lack of ownership is still one of the biggest problems we are seeing. One of the most important steps a company can make in promoting the importance of collaboration is assigning clear ownership.
The biggest benefits come when companies use collaboration technologies both internally and externally. Business processes are complex and span multiple stakeholders. Companies that are able to automate and refine these processes and interactions see returns and this is very encouraging.
Success and adoption comes from putting Web 2.0 technologies "in the line of business". If use of collaboration tools is not an additional tool or task but where the work is done, it will be used. If documents are only stored in SharePoint folders rather than in file shares, reports uploaded vs. emailed etc. everyone will get used to it quickly.
Social Networking being the highest used web 2.0 feature at 40% adoption. The term Social Networking itself is problematic as it can be used to describe many different types of interactions, from facebook to the SharePoint "colleagues" but there is no doubt that the immense popularity of these tools outside of the enterprise is having an impact, at least on what people think the priorities should be.

What's ahead?

So how will social technologies evolve in 2011? It seems like the trend of adopting successful consumer tools and bringing them to the fold will continue. The gap is still huge and for most companies, even getting to a reasonable level of sharing still is in the future but some likely candidates include:

Full adoption and usage of smartphones as working and collaboration tools, not just email.
Location a la 4square
Collaborative editing with office 2010

The Promise of the Real Time Web for the Enterprise

2009-10-14T20:05:00.003-04:00

Real Time Web is the latest trend to capture the media's attention over the past few months and indeed seems to encapsulate well the effect that Twitter and the social networks are having on the flow of information. The ability to get up to the second information about people, news and activities around the world is a foundation for a new wave of startups and services and is being integrated into search and other services.

As many users of the real time web will attest, its constant stream of information can be overwhelming and disjointed but at its best, it allows awareness and insight to emerge as the confluence of information takes a clearer shape.

Can this be useful in the enterprise? (I'll be careful from using the term Real Term Enterprise that Gartner coined a few years ago and means something else)

Companies generate huge amounts of data that rarely sees the light of day. Let's consider the following scenario – you are an account manager for several key accounts in a particular vertical. What information are you getting? Most likely direct and indirect emails consist of 90% of the information while the rest is verbal, non documented conversations. But what if you could get ream time updates on the following:

Client specific news
Client brand related blog posts, discussions, videos and tweets in real time
Vertical news
Client services updates about milestones reached
Customer Support alerts about open service tickets and their resolution status
Internal discussions and email regarding the client
External email communications with the client by different team members
Etc..

Not all of these would constitute information that someone will send a specific email on. Being aware to the stream of news, discussions and information can be invaluable for agile and responsive approach.

Our current document and email centric information systems are not built to provide this level of constant details. Using the new generation of web mashups and aggregation tools are beginning to offer reasonable solutions.

As Jennifer Martinez had recently observed in GigaOm, there is a huge potential for tools that will help sift the provide context for all these huge streams of data.

What surprises me is that most of the discussion looks at this as a new phenomena while there is an industry that has been using this method very successfully for a long time. The Bloomberg (and other) terminals provide bite size financial information in a continual stream that can be filtered, sorted and analyzed. It combines company news, industry news, transactions, price changes etc in a way that for a novice seems indecipherable but for the experience broker is a goldmine.

Providing the right tools are put in place the potential business value seem significant:

Accelerating cycles of decision making
Pushing all relevant information to you rather than pulling from multiple sources is a great time saver
Decrease the unbearable email load
Increase and broaden awareness to domain knowledge

For more information on the real time web and the type of tools that exist around it, ReadWriteWeb has compiled a great list of top 50 real time web companies and services.

The current state of Enterprise 2.0

2009-07-05T16:54:00.004-04:00

It was interesting to visit the Web 2.0 conference last week and see the progress and trends compared to my last year impressions.

Here are some of my thoughts:

SharePoint is the de-facto standard for Enterprise 2.0 While other vendors have compelling products and features, a CIO that is looking for an internal, comprehensive, secure and maintainable solution has almost only one choice (unless you are on an IBM stack..). Other tools focus on providing point solutions, hosted environments, plugging current SharePoint holes and extending functionality. Microsoft had the biggest and most impressive presence and were heavily promoting the next version SharePoint 2010 that will be launched in the SharePoint conference in October. (Some preliminary details here).

The field has definitely matured over the last year. There are more case studies and research about usage, benefits and trends although most companies are not sharing explicit ROI numbers. Some vendors have disappeared while others are growing and establishing themselves at a level where they may be considered long term players and safe for the enterprise.

The experts are still frustrated with the slow rate of adoption and the seeming growing gap between the prevalence of social tools and technologies used by marketing and sales to communicate externally Vs. they almost complete absence internally. The rapid adoption of tools like Facebook and Twitter for customer communication not just in retail but in Healthcare and other industries creates glaring discrepancies where the same companies have no tools internally and sometimes even block their own marketing teams from external use of these tools under some outdated IT policy.

IT is still not part of the discussion. That is unfortunate because as Steve Wylie, the conference director expressed in a guest post at ZDNET last week, large scale adoptions will not happen without IT.

"While we could argue that this is a very new market and that businesses take time to change, I also believe that Enterprise 2.0 will be challenged by large-scale adoption until corporate IT is fully on board. Early adoption has been largely driven by business users and department-level managers. They had a problem to solve and were fed up waiting for IT to provide the solutions they needed. They took matters into their own hands by finding workable, web-based solutions and even celebrated this new found freedom from IT. With a few exceptions, IT took a reactive posture to Enterprise 2.0 and viewed it as a threat to be managed, secured and even blocked in some cases."

Tactical view. One of the most frequently asked questions was "what is the best way to get started?". The pretty universal answer for vendors and corporate users was to approach it in a tactical manner and find a specific business problem you can solve using collaboration tools. Be it an HR portal to boost morale, tools to help virtual project teams work more efficiently, sales best practices portal or any of many other ideas. Define a narrow business case and implement. So far, trying to approach this in a strategic manner makes finding ROI a herculean task and as noted above, puts IT on the defensive. I hope that this trend will start to change as these tactical solutions rarely provide long term sustainable benefits.

Rise of the Community Manager. The most active forum was the one where the newly created function – community managers shared their challenges and tricks for getting people to take part in the social activity. First, It is great to see that many leading organizations have realized the importance of such a task although many had it as a secondary responsibility they volunteered to do rather than a full time position. Creating and maintaining a vibrant and active internal community requires skill, passion and process and the focus should rightfully be as much on that as on the tools that enable the community.

Additional impressions:

Enterprise 2.0 2009 Conference: Aggregate and Organize

Enterprise 2.0 as Business Strategy

2009-05-03T16:36:00.004-04:00

One of the strongest and most misguided arguments expressed online and in many companies we speak with about Enterprise 2.0 is that it is not strategic.

That this collection of tools, technologies and ideas is not yet mature enough, lacks proven ROI, introduces a myriad of security and governance issues and even if successful is not a priority in today's soft economy. It is too often delegated to IT managers to experiment with and report back in a few years.

Here's where the difference is: Enterprise 2.0 is not a technology. It represents first and foremost a new way of thinking, interacting and communicating that includes attitude and cultural changes, empowered by IT. Is there anything more strategic than that and more important to a business future success?

It is arguably the biggest opportunity for IT driven cultural change facing organizations since the introduction of PC networks more than 2 decades ago.

One of the C suite most important tasks is to shape an organizational culture that will make their company innovative, competitive, efficient and successful not just now but in the future. Embracing Enterprise 2.0 now and guiding their employees through this transitional period should be one of their top priorities.

While in a few cases adoption started from the bottom up, a change of this magnitude usually needs to come from the top accompanied by the matching set of values and actions that prove the seriousness and commitment to change.

It requires leadership that is able to see that transparency and increased visibility into activities throughout the company will finally enable them to know what is really happening and will create a culture of trust. That openness and exchange of ideas will lead to innovation and efficiency. That collaboration will enable a diverse workforce to work together in emergent ways while being physically and geographically dispersed.

In short, it requires vision that will set a future path and will ask managers to overcome the obstacles in the way. The type of vision CEO's need to provide and not delegate to IT managers.

The challenge and opportunity is that not many chief executives have realized yet that embracing Enterprise 2.0 is a strategic imperative and are focusing the discussion around short term ROI.

Dion Hinchcliffe at ZDNET provides a comprehensive review of the evidence and opinions regarding ROI and adoption challenges, and adds his own interesting model of collaboration cause and effect chains that while clearly provide benefits, make them harder to pinpoint and measure.

He also concludes that

"… an accumulating body of knowledge is pointing to potentially dramatic business returns with Enterprise 2.0. If these continue to be borne out, it will affect the competitive and financial positions of the companies that are proactive and therefore their long-term marketplace success"

And wonders what it will take to break the current status quo?

His colleague Dennis Howlett on the other end thinks the ROI is still years off and concludes

"As always, the secret to long term success depends on management's ability to maintain a sustained commitment and all that goes with it. The difficulty today is that same management is wondering where the next sale comes from or how cash will be generated."

The good news is that Enterprise 2.0 does not require large capital expenditures but mostly thorough organizational commitment. There has rarely been an opportunity for businesses to gain so much competitive edge by investing so little.

As in many cultural revolutions, by the time Enterprise 2.0 related changes start translating into business differentiators, organizations that have not made the transition will look as outdated as an organization resisting getting these useless PC boxes or adopting email.

Can Hospitals use Web 2.0?

2009-04-08T23:33:00.004-04:00

As organizations with a strong social purpose and educational / outreach focus, how can Hospitals remake themselves and their services to provide innovative and effective web-based information and health?

Hospitals can be seen as the center of regional health, building a community of patients, caregivers and healthcare professionals that work online and offline providing care, support and prevention.

It is an overall shift in strategy that transforms the organization to be more Open, Collaborative, Transparent, Interactive, and Social. Organizations that have successfully executed Web 2.0 initiatives: share data and information securely and seamlessly with their health care partners, provide platforms for patients, doctors, and hospitals to collaborate on improving the effectiveness of services and communications, foster community patient support networks, and empower patients to gain access to the best health care services and providers.

There have been some interesting efforts but most providers are just in the initial experimentation mode. Ed Bennett maintains a great list on his blog of all the hospitals and their social activities. According to his findings, Twitter has just become the most popular social media channel among hospitals

Paul Levy, Beth Israel Deaconess CEO has been a trail blazer in his blog, sharing thoughts, ideals, goals, results and experiences, promoting true transparency. The hospital has recently launched the first web 2.0 oriented site with a special section dedicated to interactive features such as blogs, videos, podcasts chat etc.

St. Jude Children Research Hospital has close to 35,000 fans in their facebook group and have extensive social media program on their site. Cedars Sinai in LA is using YouTube for staff recruitment purposes.

These are great examples for a few health providers that seem to have a cohesive strategy for this new interactive age. For most hospitals, just being on facebook or Twitter without setting measurable goals and defining a strategy will not yield the anticipated results.

The following diagram shows the different areas where hospitals can consider collaboration and use of social media and interactivity:

Some of the interesting opportunities for hospitals:

Use of social media and communities to create an active health community around their health facilities that will involve patients, physicians and hospitals

Enhance educational activities to include online courses and support groups

Use blogs and actual access to quality and performance data to promote transparency and trust with the community

Use advanced web analytics to capture interests and trends and improve content and services accordingly

Build a stronger relationship with Affiliated Health Professionals and allow them to collaborate and exchange knowledge

Reduce the customer support functions by moving self service functions to the web

Making the web global and local

2009-02-22T18:07:00.005-05:00

Many companies that sell products or services internationally are finding themselves in a familiar dilemma, should their web presence be global or local?

While a global site is easy to control and maintain and can ensure consistency in branding and content quality, it can not address local culture, interests and variation.

I've come across an interesting view on the site of the Localization Industry Standards Association http://www.lisa.org/

They see Globalization as a process with 2 parts

Internationalization which is the process for defining applications and sites to work in every market

Localization which is the adaptation of the International framework to local needs and

And the process as:

I agree that the best approach in most cases is to plan for the site and application to work anywhere and then build in enough flexibility for local control and adjustments.

The challenge in this approach is that defining international requirements and anticipating all local variations is very expensive and time consuming. So what should a company that is expanding internationally do? Here are a few questions and guidelines to consider:

Scope of localization: how are you products or services different around the world? Is it exactly the same product (jewelry tableware for example) or does a local audience may have preferences that will impact selection and availability of products (fashion and cosmetics). If the products need to meet local regulations, standards or laws (220V or 110V for consumer electronics, Material Safety or FDA approvals for Chemicals and Drugs) or if products include attributes like language that will make them market specific (Books and CD's). In each case, a single catalog for all products will provide the easiest way to maintain master product data but sites level of granularity may be determined by the variance in offering. It may be truly global, regional, country or language specific.

Centralized or Distributed management. Who will maintain content, details, specs etc. in local languages? Do you assume that a product is not released until all languages have been updated? Do you allow a default language to remain until a local language become available? Is this the responsibility of a central translation group of does it goes downstream to the local group to translate? (If you are thinking about machine translation, don't. This technology is still not ready for prime time and will drive off disappointed customers)

How local should you go? to create a true sense of local site and service, certain adjustments may be needed to the site so it does not look like the translated version of the global template. Does the site has local news and events? Is there editorial content from local sources? Are reviews and communities local? Does the interface adapt to local language without cutting words or providing headers in English? Are local conventions like time format, date format, calendar, currency, address, name formats etc. are specific or generic?

Build from scratch or retrofit? While substantial amounts have been invested in current web and e-commerce infrastructure, allowing for globalization and localization is not an easy retrofit and in many cases it will be faster and cheaper in the long term to build a technology foundation that is designed to support these issues. Technology issues to consider:
- Separation of content from the display. There should be no text or images in pages and no parameters in queries. Many CMS systems support localization and handle pages this way by default but custom build CMS systems rarely do.
- Support for UTF-8: databases and management tools as well as search engines must support UTF-8
- Caching and Performance: a system must be designed with advanced caching to avoid extensive load on the database for rendering local editions
- Support for variable length and right to left interfaces. Different languages have very different word length and even orientation. How will interfaces that were designed for exact size look?

While these are not simple questions to answer and resolve, creating a global experience with local flavors and details can substantially impact the ability of a company to succeed internationally.

Can in-store e-commerce save retailers?

2009-02-08T19:56:00.005-05:00

Image Source: "Are you being served" British sitcom

We tried to buy new Dinnerware last weekend after the cats decided collectively that they are tired of the old set and began systematically decimating it.

It became an interesting case study in the epic battle between brick and mortar and e-commerce.
Both have been slumping lately. Retailers have been hit hard and e-commerce spending last holiday season was down for the first time ever. All the more reason for retailers to try harder, right?

We went to the Bloomingdale’s home store to browse (E-commerce sites are still miles away from presenting products in a way that will compete with the in-store experience) and actually found a set we were willing to buy. A few minutes on our mobile devices confirmed that the store price was comparable to the one offered by e-tailers and we were ready to lock and load.

Not so fast.

Only a portion of the sets were in stock. The rest would need to be delivered.
They wanted to charge us for the delivery. Only after we mentioned that online the delivery is free, and following a comical chase throughout the store for the manager that took 15 minutes we got the shipping fee waived.
Then we got to the soup bowls. Their exact color was not in the system. Products in the in-store green screen system have no pictures. How can I be sure then that the item with the long number but no color code will be the right one?

After waiting at the register for 45 minutes we gave up, went home and would order on-line.

There seem to be very few things left that are worth the hassle and bad service, lines and cost of retail.

Retailers need to create an in-store experience that has the best of both worlds. The actual products you can touch feel or put on, and the information, reviews, competitive prices and even ordering for items that are not currently available in the store.

Since the sales assistants in these department stores can barely answer questions as they struggle to service customers, why not provide information kiosks that explain the difference between bone china and ceramics, help guide you to the most appropriate set based on price, quality or brand and allow you to place an order with in-store pickup or delivery.

On the link between Usability and ROI

2009-01-19T20:14:00.004-05:00

A just released survey of the top 40 e-commerce sites asked users to rate their satisfaction with the buying experience. In the results, the survey director notes "higher customer satisfaction ratings often translate into loyalty and purchase intent".

It is amazing that we still need surveys to tell us that. Web usability started as an art and is now an established science that uses audience personas, usage stories and needs mapping to optimize site flow, calls to action and creating an engaging yet efficient experience tailored to each visitor.

Jacob Nielsen in recent studies found an improvement of 83% to 138% in KPI's resulting from a web usability redesign. In about 12% of the cases, the increase was tenfold.

With every web initiative need to provide Return On Investment (ROI) justification, most sites and applications have huge potential for improvement and can easily justify usability upgrades.

How to build a strong ROI case

The common formula for the commerce site business potential is based on the simple concept of getting as many visitors as possible and converting them into paying customers.

Business = Visits x Conversion Rate X Average purchase amount (For each revenue stream on the site)

Let's look at each of these 3 components that largely determine site performance: volume, conversion and purchase size and see where the usability comes in.

Volume: traffic is comprised of new traffic and repeat traffic (V = Vnew + Vrepeat). Attracting new visitors to the site can be expensive and the acquisition cost is often reduced from the total revenue generated. Repeat and loyal visitors are essential to profitability and any improvement in the repeat visitor rate has significant impact on the bottom line. Good user experience that contributes to customer satisfaction will increase the number of repeat visits and add traffic without the acquisition cost.

Conversion Rate: The other critical role of usability is to make sure each visitor is provided with their specific needs which are not always a direct purchase. In a previous post I looked at the new e-commerce paradigm that acknowledges the multiphase shopping experience and provides information, interaction and solutions for visitor in every phase of their purchasing decisions. User experience optimization can have a dramatic effect on converting a visitor to a customer.

Purchase Size: Amazon started product merchandizing, upsells and recommendations more than a decade ago but many companies still are not perfect at providing users with additional options and suggestions throughout the checkout process.

Therefore the impact of usability on the Business consists of the increase in repeat traffic (∆Vrepeat), the increase in conversion rate ∆CR and the increase in purchase size ∆PA or in a formula: B = (Vnew + (Vr + ∆Vr)) x (CR + ∆CR) x (PA + ∆PA)

Usability contributions to cost reduction and savings:

Reduction in marketing spend for new customer acquisition. The same traffic goals can be achieved with more repeat traffic reducing marketing expenses for new traffic generation.

Reduction in calls to phone support

Other factors to consider:

The cost of doing nothing. Not improving usability can actually hurt the factors listed above as the market is not static. The overall web usability standards have increased with rich interfaces and Ajax style functionality. Sites that have not caught up, look dated and clumsy. The competition is not static either. If your site's experience is inferior to the competition, traffic will move there.

Social media and word of mouth quickly spread good experiences and bad one to an extremely wide audience.

And lastly, without good web analytics program and measurements, you may not know to identify the challenges of poor usability or the contributions of improvements so consider setting an analytics baseline prior to any substantial improvements.

Top web technology trends for 2009

2008-12-02T20:18:00.002-05:00

The Holidays are here and with them all the yearly summaries and forecasts. It may be a good idea to go back a year and check how many oracles have seen this slowdown coming..

As I look ahead to 2009, I see a few clear trends for web technology areas that are providing value in these rough economic times and are maturing to the point that companies cannot ignore anymore.

Gartner published their list of strategic technology trends for 2009 a few weeks back. They highlight Cloud Computing, Web Oriented Architecture, Enterprise Mashups and Social Software and Social Networking.

Here are 5 additional web technology trends that will be important in 2009, in no particular order:

Actionable Web Analytics as part of Enterprise BI and Dashboards.
Web Analytics in many organizations is still an orphan with no real parents. Every department looks at its data but rarely does it get a strategic priority as an indicator of business trends and business intelligence asset. Investment in web analytics allows for customer insights, marketing spend ROI, conversion optimization and can impact the bottom line. As companies invest in sophisticated BI and analytical dashboards, web based data that is not transactional is usually not there. Integrating web traffic and user interest data into these systems can result in new insights and better actionable data.

Phone Browser Compatibility
Mobile computing is booming. About 13M iPhones were sold so far, and the support for location and browser that both the Android, Blackberry and all Microsoft based smartphones are offering, the percentage of traffic to web sites coming from phones is already in the 3%-10% range and will only increase. These are not the early 00's WAP/WML jokes but full HTML browsers. Still, these special browsers are very different from the full version used on PC's and Laptops. Bandwidth is still a challenge and their support for Rich Applications such as Flash and Silverlight is lacking. If you have a fancy Flash based site, your users will most likely not see a thing. Companies that have ignored it so far will have to adjust their sites or redirect mobile traffic to a mirror mobile optimized site.

Location based services
Continuing from the previous point, these mobile devices have GPS included and location based applications can drastically impact the user experience. Either as an iPhone/Android application or websites, the ability to share location information and get back location specific data about local services, other people, events, sales or anything else adds a new dimension to mobile applications.

Increased reliance on open source infrastructure products and technologies
Free is always a powerful word. Strong and reliable open source environments allow companies to create a robust e-commerce infrastructure with little or no proprietary platforms. The excellent Apache OFBiz for example, provides strong open source modules for e-commerce, ERP, CRM and many others. Alfresco offers a great content management solution and multiple open source development environments are available. The case for Enterprise Open Source web environment is getting stronger every day.

Approaching Social Networking and Collaboration in a Strategic way
Everyone now realizes the power of social networks and is rushing to get in, establish a FaceBook page, a Twitter account and get's their PR to sprawl the web to "engage" people. Internally, companies are haphazardly trying various collaboration methods. We see a maturity process happening through 2009 that will force companies to look at all their collaboration points in a strategic way and tie them to business goals and processes. This new approach will transform them from toys to tools and will establish their place and value in the new order.

New directions in Web Strategy

2008-10-14T21:25:00.000-04:00

I have recently completed several web strategy engagements and noticed how much the focused has changed in the last few years.

I remember doing a web strategy engagement for a major publisher, where the focus was making the site sticky, relevant and where the success metrics were visits to the site, length of stay and frequency of visits. The Marketing team focused its budgets and efforts on generating traffic and shoring up the features, tools and information provided.

The challenge with this strategy is that introducing a new and valuable destination for users in the current saturated and fragmented web market is extremely expensive and hard to sustain beyond the initial marketing campaigns.

With consumers (and business users) spending more and more of their time in specific sites, social networks and through mobile devices, businesses are following suite and coming to the mountain.

A recent statement from one of our clients summarizes the change nicely “We need to be where our audience lives, not focus on getting them to us”

An updated strategy would try to make content and services available where people already spend time. In addition to the central site, companies are finding ways to leverage their content and services throughout the web.

It is much harder than building a great website and doing expensive SEO/SEM. Not that these can go by the wayside, they are still very important but additionally the following must be considered:

Who are your different audiences? What are their online habits and communication preferences? Should you revise segmentation models from site activity focus to external behavior and web usage patterns?
What information and services will make sense to expose? In what format? Is it sufficient to provide text based RSS, audio podcasts, Video Webcasts?
What can be packaged in widgets, plugins and applications?
Do you have location specific services and applications that will help users with mobile devices?

The benefits can be substantial, expanding reach at a fraction of the cost needed to get people to the company’s site and are much more sustainable over a period of time.

In addition to its impact on marketing, the new outreach strategy has a large impact on the technology. Bringing renewed value to service oriented architecture and modular design, the ability to segment and deliver slivers of content and functionality to remote users can only be achieved if the applications are built using open standards and accessible through web API’s.

Google releases Chrome a new web browser

2008-09-01T20:05:00.004-04:00

I'm very excited about the news breaking out today of Chrome: the new browser from Google. It will launch tomorrow and you can read all about it on Google's blog and see their tech friendly comic book (that is brilliant by itself).

I have to admit that both the last release from Firefox and especially the half baked lackluster IE8 beta from Microsoft were disappointing. While providing relatively minor improvements to most users, they failed to address the biggest challenge confronting the continuing growth of the web: inherent support for rich applications.

The browser had become the master application where most of our work and play on the computer is done these days. As Google had nicely put it in their blog post "All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends -- all using a browser." ... "What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build"

So it seems that the guys at Google understood that if they base their business on web browsing, they better make sure that browsing experience is fast, secure and continues to flourish. Counting on Microsoft to do that for you is ...

Here is a short list of some of the innovation the Chrome is introducing:

Process isolation for tabs and plugins within tabs. Awesome. No more will a single window force me to kill the browser with all 30 tabs I have open gone with the wind.
New Javascript virtual machine that will product compiled machine code. If Javascript is to be the future of rich web interfaces (as opposed to the propriatery Flash or Silverlight) it needs to run fast and be more robust and that's exactly what the new virtual machine is providing.
Gears Integration: with Gears support for persistency and OS level access, developers can build client level applications for the web with reasonable portability
Security: the new security model offers a strong foundation for ongoing security schema that can be used by application coders and plugin providers.

Google will also make the whole thing open source, allow plugins and invites everyone to add and extend.

That's the kind of innovation we need in order to keep the web growing and becoming the robust platform for work and play.

I can't wait to give it a full try tomorrow.

On the future of local newspapers

2008-08-14T20:04:00.008-04:00

I have to admit, I never subscribed to a daily newspaper. I love news and get them in many ways. When I ride the train to Manhattan I’d always look for the paper another passenger had left behind. On rare occasions I was even observed digging through the tubs of used newspapers at the Hoboken station. Killing time on a train with no internet connection is when I desperately need a newspaper. Mostly, I get my news online. What could be better than up to the minute, targeted news?

Well, in a futile effort to turn back time, the Philadelphia Inquirer is trying to fend off declining print circulation by giving the print edition more relevancy. How? By instituting a policy of “print first” and instructing staff not to break stories on line.

I’ve talked recently with a few people in the publishing industry. While all share the same core problem: advertising for their online media does not compensate for the decline in print ad revenues and smaller circulation, none thought that this trend is reversible and that by restricting your online content, demand for the print product will suddenly rise.

It brings up a few good questions.

Is the printed newspaper as we know it doomed for extinction?
I think so. Good content still has a market, and it will still be paid for by advertising before, during and around the content. Since so many of us carry with us everywhere our electronic reading devices (from the laptop, through the iphone to the Kindle), how can you continue to justify the destruction of the rain forest?

How will publishers make money then? What is the future business model?
We all know that charging users for online content works only in places where the employer, rather than the consumer, pays the bill. Many of the paid subscribers of the WSJ.com or the Harvard Business Review HBR.com do not foot the bill themselves. Nobody else is able to charge for content. Salon.com have tried every possible avenue in the last few years and settled on just tons of advertising.

What can the local newspaper do? Become the center of local information and local community. Open up and think about the paper not as an employer of journalists, but as a provider of unique and easy to access valued content.
The content will come from many sources. AP, Local reporters, Local analysts, Community journalists (the fancy name for everyone and their sister), local and global bloggers, etc. The publisher returns to being a content publisher rather than a content producer. By sifting through the mountains of content, editors can clean, categorize, source, and filter, tag, recommend content so we as users get relevant content we care about (and are willing to tolerate the ads that accompany them. In one of the successful models I’ve seen, the premium accounts main premium is the removal of most ads.)

Advertising budgets are moving online (33% increase in the last year) consistently with the increase of time we spend online. As ad technology, bandwidth and targeting algorithms improve, a publisher that can deliver a highly segmented audience with a high quality ad experience will be able to ask for top dollars.

Online advertising rates will increase. As we move towards a 100% trackable media, the difference between TV and the computer will diminish. Both channels will deliver similar content supported by ads. Advertisers will pay by reach, and if the quality of the experience is the same, an interactive experience where the user can click the ad and go to the advertiser should be worth more!.

So goodbye newspaper and hello to a local media center that is more open, interactive, customized and relevant. Eventually, even profitable.

Enterprise Web 2.0 Solution Stack

2008-07-29T22:57:00.006-04:00

A visitor walking the show floor at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference would find it hard to define what all these companies and product have in common and what qualifies them to be categorized as Enterprise Web 2.0 solution providers.

While vendors of organizational social networks are a clear fit, what is common to advanced search vendors, enterprise mashup providers, Content Management vendors and video broadcasting solutions?

It seems that the common thread is a shared vision of the future enterprise as a social, open and collaborative place where data, content, knowledge and expertise are more easily available and where productivity results from enhanced collaboration and information sharing.

We can categorize the solution areas based on what they allow the user to do:

Finding information and data across silos and systems is still the holy grail of today's information systems. Our information workers are dependent on their access to information but the ever growing amount and complexity of the data makes it harder and harder.

Most basic Enterprise 2.0 products cover the first 4 levels. They include a basic search for content within the network, provide tools for creating new content, sharing, and collaboration using technologies like discussions, wiki's, blogs, RSS, Public Profiles, and groups.

The fifth level offers a unique opportunity to leverage the interactions, conversations and links to add context and intelligence. By using Tags or by auto detection of terms and traffic patterns, some of the solutions can help create a layer of relationships and meaning on top of the content and link together disparate pieces of content, data and people for a complete picture

The 6th level in our stack consists of tools that try to bring together and connect data from disparate

The big promise of an Enterprise 2.0 internal implementation beyond the important but somewhat intangible benefits of employee involvement, morale and ability to express themselves, is the promise of better information and easier access.

An important aspect of this is not to limit the views to social data. The social fabric helps to connect the dots but it must be laid on top of the existing corporate content, people and data, not by its own.

Investments in SOA and Web Services can finally be realized not just by the application interoperability but by the ability of users to create custom views of data and sharing them.

Vegetarians in Paris

2008-07-06T18:44:00.002-04:00

The Non-Blonde and I just came back from Paris and while you can read all about out olfactory adventures in her recent posts, I promised to share with our fellow vegetarians some tips and reviews from Paris restaurants.

As is well known and documented, Paris is the gastronomic capital of the world except if you happen not to eat meat. In contrast to the pleasant surprise we had in London last year, restaurants in general do not have a vegetarian menu, do not list ingredients and will not understand what you mean by vegetarian dish even if you do so in French.

So we ate ethnic and in special vegetarian places. There are several good Indian restaurants that have a vegetarian Thali. The Moroccan restaurants will usually have a vegetarian Tagin and / or couscous. We ate couscous twice and enjoyed it very much. The only drawback is the meat consumed by everyone around you and the general smell of your neighbor 4^th of July grill. If you can stand it, these are great options. Most will not make it into the Zagat or any other guide but are worth checking out.

We did a fairly extensive research before the trip and mapped out the top vegetarian restaurants based mostly on CityVox that has an impressive list of vegetarian restaurants with reviews. Most are in French but can be easily translated. None of the other guides I found online was as accurate.

Another great resource is http://www.parisvegetarian.com/ that has great reviews on many vegetarian places to eat.

Here are the restaurants we are at:

Tugalik, 4, Rue Toullier Tel : 01 43 54 41 49
Tugalik is a warm and friendly place right next to the Sorbonne. It serves world cuisine and calls itself Bio, which could mean Organic or Sustainable. It is not vegetarian but has several vegetarian options and we were able to have a great meal there. Dishes included a chilled pea soup, Lentil Salad and more.
Le Grenier de Notre-Dame ,18 Rue de la Bûcherie Tel : 01 43 29 98 29
A small and crowded hole in the wall, at a great location near the Notre-Dame. The food was a disappointment. It was bland and tended towards the macrobiotic style. The only reason to go in is if you happen to be touring the area as there are not too many options there. Not worth a special visit.
Maceo, 15 Rue des Petits Champs Telephone: 00 (33) 14297 5385
Macao is a beautifully designed high ceiling restaurant that is full of light and inviting. It is also the best vegetarian food we had in Paris. It is not vegetarian but they have a green menu with enough options in it to allow 2 people to eat a different meal. We had a great dining experience and the food was excellent. A must for our next visit.
Le Potager du Marais 22, Rue Rambuteau, 75003 Paris Tel : 01 42 74 24 66
This completely vegetarian place has one long communal table and offers a fresh and varied menu. We had Lentil soup that was nice and shared a tofu main course that was very satisfying. We would be glad to go back there and try the rest of the menu.
La Victoire Suprême du Coeur, 29 Rue du Bourg Tibourg Tel : 01 40 41 95 03
We had such a great time at this little Marais vegetarian that after eating there dinner on Saturday we came back for Sunday brunch. Everything on the menu was great and the brunch was so good, I had stuffed myself beyond what is advisable. We'll be back.

We had planned to visit a few other places but did not get a chance. I put all locations on a Google map for easy reference.

Recap from Enterprise 2.0 Conference:

2008-06-12T23:02:00.004-04:00

I've attended 2 days of the conference and it was interesting and productive.

Here are some of the highlights:

The overall tone was very optimistic about the benefits that collaboration can bring the enterprise and tat compared to previous shifts, it is relatively inexpensive and can be done one piece at a time
Forrester research estimates the market size for enterprise 2.0 to be 4.6 billion by 2013
Beyond many benefits that were discussed, like fostering innovation, improved knowledge management, improved sense of community in the company and employee engagement, the overall consensus was that this change is inevitable. It is not so much a manner of what benefits will the company gain from introducing these tools but that by 2014 50% of the workforce will be consisted of Gen Y workers and that is the way they expect to interact and work.
The gap that exists right now between the home environment and the office environment (where for the first time, people have a more sophisticated and rich environment at home) will force companies to match the conditions and tools that prevail outside.
Measures of success: are very different based on the industry. While Sony are seeing participation levels of over 50%, Pfizer are very happy to have 10% of the workforce participate.
While everyone acknowledged that these changes go well beyond tools and technologies, very little was actually discussed regarding leading the cultural change. The majority opinion was:
1. Build and make them easy to use
2. Lead by example: move your activity there and expect everyone to follow
3. Put the use of these tools in the line of business so everyone understands that is the way to get things done.
4. Do not despair and keep on going. Change will happen.
The exact tool does not matter. It is true that your investment and level of effort will differ but at the end of the day, you can make any toolset work for you.
Common approaches:
1. Sharepoint+. Since Microsoft provide corporate licenses that give companies free licenses to sharepoint. It is the most commonly deployed and used platform. It is also one of the weakest and many vendors offer additions and enhancements that make it more user friendly and add missing features. I really liked NewsGator that have a platform that sits on top of the sharepoint installation and makes it a kickass tool.
2. OpenSource: many companies have taken multiple open source products (there are thousands) and integrated them together. A new company has taken Drupal, one of the strongest open source portal platforms and added 30 of the best products into its framework and will offer it free as open source social platform.
3. Custom platforms like Jive offer very user friendly and feature rich collaboration tools but as with any proprietary local software – you have product limitations you cannot code your way around.
4. SaaS providers – vendors that will host everything for you. Some with good API's
Security and access concerns in large companies were that hardest to resolve. In Sony, it took 6 months to build and 12 months to get the security plan approved.
Oracle and IBM are making a strong move into the space. IBM release a set of tools based on Notes for collaboration and will launch a toolset for Mashups in a few months. Oracle is launching its WebCenter platform that will include social computing aspects and …Mashups as well.
Many providers offer turnkey solutions for customer community.

The Mashups are coming! The Mashups are coming!

2008-06-11T23:57:00.003-04:00

One of the more interesting trends in this week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference was the introduction of a few recently launched or upcoming Mashup products.

The Mashup is the next step of the evolution from Portals and Dashboards. You can not only select what information you'd like displayed on your custom page, you can also connect it together and create light weight applications that bring up or filter information in an information source based on data from anther.

As long as all your information sources are exposing web services API's that is.

The most common examples always involve pulling up a list of customers from your CRM system, and showing them on the map of the US as generated by Google maps. Clicking on a company name can bring current weather information at their headquarters, recent company news from the New York Times and the current value of the stock price as well as recent orders they've made and open service requests that are open. By bringing and linking together information from various internal and external sources the user gets the information they need at their fingertips before calling the client.

Several vendors have offerings in this area but in the conference this week, both IBM and Oracle showcased new Mashup tools that can increase the awareness to these tools and technologies.

IBM is planning to release in a few months a major update to their Mashup toolkit. From the Demo I've seen, it is very impressive and according to the reps will be a standalone product geared towards business users. In the demo, adding and connecting widgets on the page was done in an AJAX style interface that made the experience look simple.

Oracle new behemoth called WebCenter includes many components and tools that allow you to build social applications and mashups. They have a pretty good video showcasing the social aspects of the new system and the mashup capabilities. Getting the benefits out of this framework will require substantial effort.

I love the mashup concept and looking forward to play with the IBM toolkit when it comes out.

In the Cloud we trust – and so should you?

2008-06-11T23:51:00.004-04:00

I'm not really sure how Cloud Computing is directly relevant to the coming social revolution that was the stated subject of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference but it will definitely have a significant impact on how future applications will be architected and how much of an enterprise's computing and storage would be done inside Vs. outside. There is no doubt that the ability to use unlimited computing power and unlimited storage is a great solution for current point problems. A future vision by which a company does not need any internal IT resources is not that far away but still needs to overcome a few big hurdles in Security, Portability, Orchestration and availability, redundancy and cost of network bandwidth.

That said, for startup that want to start small and scale with success it is godsend.

A few years back I was implementing a youth portal for a company that built a nice community around crazy animated characters and greeting cards. The typical volume was high but would spike 4 fold around Valentine's Day. It was a very expensive proposition to purchase equipment that would sit at low utilization for most of the year.

Amazon has the most complete offering with its Amazon Web Services as it allows you to build, host and maintain web application in the cloud without hosting contracts, worrying about leasing sufficient hardware to handle traffic and usage spikes, without expensive external storage arrays for storage space etc. If we only had it then.

Google are a recent entry in this category offering Google Apps, a Python based environment to build and run applications in the cloud using other Google applications.

No one is yet offering the "virtual private cloud" that will connect all of your outsourced applications in a secure and collaborative manner. It will combine your hosted CRM and ERP solutions with a virtual desktop for every employee and a virtual file servers and web applications all hosted by various SAAS vendors but available to the individual user as if they were local and behind the firewall. Something to keep working on..

First impressions from Enterprise 2.0 Conference

2008-06-11T23:49:00.002-04:00

I've spent the last 3 days in Boston for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.

It was a great opportunity to catch-up with everyone in this arena and see what's new and exciting.

Enterprise 2.0 is a relatively new term that refers to applying the same principals and tools of collaboration that have made web 2.0 such a huge success and trying to apply them inside the enterprise.

Others call it Intranet 2.0 and from what I've seen, most efforts are still within those familiar Intranet boundaries: how we provide easier access to information, resources, expertise and tools that will make the knowledge worker more productive – now new and improved with a social twist.

Most of the effort is spent on getting these new tools (Wikis, Blogs, Discussions, Networks, communities etc.) implemented and used, for their own specific benefits and not as the first step in a larger transformation the enterprise has to embrace to become a 2.0 organization.

There was no discussion about the true meaning of Enterprise 2.0 and the enormous impact that these inevitable transformations will have. It seems that most early adopters are happy with even a 10% adoption of these limited technologies within their organizations and do not even dare engage in wider discussions.

Still, it was encouraging to see many companies and vendors taking the first steps in this direction and willing to experiment and explore.

Here are a few trends and thoughts from the conference that I'll stretch over the next few posts.

URL vs. Search

2008-05-26T15:05:00.004-04:00

When you look for a site, do you type the full URL of the site (www and all) or do you just type the main terms and look through the search results?

My answer will be "It depends". Short, simple URLs I type, while more complex ones I don't bother.

Two interesting recent articles talk about the impact of this shift.

In Japan, ads are starting to use search terms instead of full URL. As the article title says: URL's are totally out.

Josh, at ReadWriteWeb wrote this week that The URL Is Dead, Long Live Search detailing a similar shift in advertising and use of the web by users.

So what should a marketer do?

Well, not surprisingly it makes having a top rank in organic and paid search for the key terms users will be looking for, more important than ever. The use of consistent and concise terminology to describe products and services (and naming them) so they translate to search terms and triple checking all your pages have keywords and are accessible to search engines.

You may even take a reverse engineering approach and advertise keywords you know give you the first ranking at the moment and changing these terms for each campaign.

I think that beyond advertising, search (and especially Google) has gotten so good that people assume that Search will bring relevant results and is reliable. This level of quality search in now expected inside the site as well, and often to awfully disappointing results.

I see the results of this trend having a major impact on site architecture and design, giving users a prominent search as the main navigation tool and the rising importance of site search quality of results.

Materials for my next post.

Startups

2008-04-23T11:14:00.001-04:00

There has been a lot of very interesting discussion following the post from Fred Wilson about the need of the VC community in a new path to liquidity.

Most of the discussion centered around that with the IPO path closed and the big guys buying less companies than they did in the past, how can a VC expect to get the high sort term returns they expect?

While I understand the terms and the rules of this game, I can't escape the feeling that something is wrong in this picture. No one is talking about the most important thing: building a profitable business. Building companies with no valid business model that got huge valuations and were sold for millions was what caused a lot of the last bubble. It seems to me that the VC model as we know it today was created during the .com hype and is trying to hand on to the same model.

There is no reason a new technology company should be evaluated for investment in a different way than a new biotech or any other type of company. It needs to have a clear business model that does not have the words "Free" and "Ad supported" anywhere. You do not build a profitable business on giving free something and hoping advertising will one way support it. As in the late 90's, were back to eyeballs forgetting they do not really translate into huge advertising revenues.

I think the short term, hype focused thinking of the VC community has also hurt the real innovation and the true entrepreneurs. For the kids who graduate from college today, the message is not "focus on engineering the next great product / platform people will be willing to pay for" but "find a cool idea that will get many eyeballs, work really hard for a few years and then get rich and be a VC yourself" It focuses on the cursory rather than the true innovative and fundamental change.

I think the solution is in a new type of VC. The old style VC type. The type that requires and evaluates a business plan based on its path to profitability. It doesn't even need to be long term. You can not foresee a market and demand for more than 3-5 years anyway but you can still say how you plan to make money.

For all those who say you can't charge for anything these days, here are a few examples of services that I (and other people) am willing to pay for:

Snapfish: Easy and convenient place to store and print your photos. Available for reprints any time and a backup for your whole archive. Free if you maintain a minimum of prints per year. Works for me.
Zagat: the bible. Worth every cent.
Ebay
I would be willing to pay for Blogger if they asked for money..
Harvard Business Review
WFUV radio station (a donation, but payment none the less)

In general, I am willing to pay for content or services I enjoy and provide me with value.

I see a few different paths that new and existing on-line players can take to be profitable without relying solely on fickle ad revenue.

Micro Payments. Or rather, mini payments. As a compromise between the economically challenged Free to the scary monthly subscription, a pay as you go with small amounts spent based on content consumption may prove the solution. The New York Times had recently cancelled their "Select" content that was available only to subscribers. I admit, I did not subscribe. Not all content they bundled under the Select program was appropriate for me and as I am not a consistent reader, the price was too high. Had they set a price of 10c per article I would have gladly paid for many articles.
Cater to the needs of businesses. I find it very indicative of this whole discussion that the focus of entrepreneurs and VC's has been so much stronger on consumer sites and not on business sites and services. If you go after the business community you could actually charge for your service and build a business. There may be a less aggressive payday as the focus is on building sustainable products and services, not on hype. Companies like 37 signals or Six apart have managed to cater to those needs and establish real businesses.
One model that does work well is releasing a free base product (to lure people in) with additional paid tiers for more services and features.

On Web Analytics and Web ROI

2008-04-14T02:04:00.002-04:00

I used to spend quite a lot of time with web analytics tools in the early 2000's and have recently had the opportunity to use them again after a few years.

I'm happy to see the scope of web analytics finally expanding beyond the web. It always looked awkward that we would analyze web behavior and customers without integrating off line data, link email and direct marketing results or view how all the different channels integrate.

The new offerings from companies like WebTrends are trying to create a more complete and actionable picture for marketing and business managers.

On the other hand, what used to be one of the simplest tasks in a web development projects, now become one of the most complex.

It was almost an afterthought. You build a site, you turn server logging on and after a few minutes of configuration, the web analytics tool spits our great looking graphs tables and stats about visits, paths etc.

Today, in the age of ROI, websites need to provide metrics that are well beyond web analysis. While no one questions the criticality of a website, the actual value it provides can be very often underestimated. With businesses tightening their belts and questioning new investments, answering the Web ROI question becomes essential and it is not an easy question to answer.

Avinash had a great post a few months back about the futility of trying to get all you web related data in one place and the necessity of using multiple tools to collect and analyze data.

I agree with him that trying to create a huge system that integrates all the different data sources and channels is not the best way to go. The web is too dynamic for complex end to end integration tools.

I think that the best way to communicate the web ROI to upper management is to establish clear metrics and measures at several levels and make them the center of your tracking policy. While it may be strategically beneficial to collect huge portions of clickstream data and running it through data mining tools, the priority should be in making the web channel a proactive, flexible and profitable part of the company.

Here are some of the key things I would look at. The tools then must be able to give us these answers, not the other way around.

Web site mechanics: does our site work? It sounds simple but how much do you really know about the user experience, response times, errors and such. This is where IT and site developers must be accountable and youd better know what is happening before you learn it from your customers. These need to be automated and should generate alerts once they get to high levels. Key metrics can include:
1. Sever and network uptime
2. Page load time for key site pages
3. Spike in errors
4. Failed transactions
5. Spike in Repeated actions
6. Action levels going below a certain threshold.
7. Utilization rates of our resources: memory, CPU, Network
The basics: our site goals: what are we expecting from our site? How do we measure success? It depends on your business model but it is too often done in reverse. We look at the web statistics and try to find where we succeed. Important metrics can include:
1. Total unique visitors
2. Total page views and user actions by section
3. Site engagement (as measured by time spent and number of site interactions)
4. Conversion rates (and micro conversions)
5. Top accessed support questions / help topics / items searched on.
6. All of the above over time. Trends.
Direct Revenues: the simple part. How much does our site with all of it's revenue streams is generating. How many leads. To what percentage of our business that it account?
Measuring the impact of marketing investments: one of the most valuable types of data that can be collected through site traffic is the immediate response and conversions due to online and offline marketing activities. All 3 main metrics we looked at: traffic, engagement and conversions need to be attributed to a source and then correlated to marketing activities. It may be helpful to create a combined metric that would make comparing these campaigns and their results easier. For example: for each visit we get through a campaign we assign 1 point for existing user, 5 for new user, 5 points for each engagement action they did, 10 points for each mini conversion and 50 points for each major conversion. Actual revenue from transactions and total campaign costs are to be considered. Establishing these standards for campaign ROI will allow actual comparison and meaningful data to be extracted.
Customer segmentation and personalization: any demographic or behavioral data can be helpful in future segmentation. The metrics in this area should focus on the increase in customer intelligence.
1. % increase in user data collected
Web Impact: how much impact does our web site have on web discussions, blogs, emails etc. Measuring the social impact of web activities is a new category that can be helpful in seeing beyond the direct inbound traffic and into the discussions, references, and links to our site as an important measure of influence.

Collecting this data and providing management with a clear picture of the website operations, contributions and ROI would provide a strong foundation for future investments and enhancements.

The Unified Theory Part 2

2008-04-07T18:00:00.002-04:00

Continuing from part 1, we'll add a few more elements to the picture.

For each of the 3 main parts in the customer lifecycle, and for each of the 3 main interactions we can identify high level actions and activities.

During the E-awareness phase, Potential customers are being exposed to the brand and products. They read or hear about experiences other people had with the brand and form an opinion and impression. The vendor needs to build awareness through the regular channels but also monitor closely their online reputation and engage in social marketing activities to create a positive vibe and word of mouth in the websphere. These activities can have influence on potential customers both directly and indirectly.

As people move into the next level of interest and start to do their research on your products and services, they look to all available resources, ones that they know and trust but also any specific opinion that can be found on a Google search. The Vendor's responsibility is to

Provide the interested customer with ALL the information they may be looking for in an easy to find way. Don't force them to go somewhere "independent" to get your product data. Consider putting reviews from around the web directly at your site and also to allow user reviews directly there.
Engage the customer: the more ways you provide for a customer to explore and learn about the product or service, the more comfort and confidence they will have for making a purchase. Tools for customization, for configuration, for usages of the product etc. would be great.
Provide an easy way to complete the transaction. It sounds simple but has to be paramount in everyone's mind. How do we make the actual purchase easy and simple.

During the research process, customers are exposed to what other people are saying about you. Vendors need to be aware and engaged in these conversations in the most open and transparent way. If someone posts a negative review or a negative experience, they cannot be argued with or threatened to change their opinion. If you show interest in their bad experience and try to see if it can be remedied you may have better success. Positive and honest effort to resolve issues may make a publicly negative experience into a positive one.

After the customer made the transaction, provide them with all the information and means for self service. Think proactively on the 20 most common questions or issues your customers may have an provide it right after they complete the purchase and in to follow-up email. Provide an easy way to report issues and address them quickly. Any frustration in this phase that does not have an easy outlet will find itself in the public outlet where it can no longer be addressed easily. Issues that have been posted publicly should be addressed in a transparent way and resolved if possible but not all issues will and negative feedback is part of the picture.

The Unified Theory Part 1

2008-04-05T15:53:00.003-04:00

One of the good things I'm learning about writing a blog is the ability to release thoughts out without necessarily having the bigger picture completely worked out. Very agile.

So building on many of my thoughts form earlier posts, here is what I see as the higher level map of e-business 2.0.

It includes on top the customer, peer, and vendor relationships

On the other it looks at the customer lifecycle from e-awareness to e-commerce and e-service. Each one of these buckets includes the actions and interactions in the phase.

On the bottom it has the funnel that collects all possible data from all these interactions and processes it as analytics, to be fed into the systems and decision processes that will improve the next iterations.

A quick note on the terminology I use. I dropped the 2.0 form the end of everything as under the bigger umbrella of e-business 2.0 we are living in a 2.0 universe and repeating it everywhere looks awkward. I did keep the E- in front of everything to focus on the e channel. It is true that the walls are getting blurry and an E-customer may call the call center for support, the same way a store customer would and vice versa for the use of e-service. I do think that organization will need to expand this picture to integrate the e-channel data into the rest of the channels but for now, we will focus exclusively on the e-channels.

E-business 2.0 high level map

What I think differentiates this model from traditional e-business models:

Peers. The influence of peers as part of a social network or even opinions of strangers expressed in blogs and communities or review sites had increased tenfold and has to be acknowledged and managed.
E-marketing is evolving into e-awareness as marketing and PR work together to create awareness to brand and products.
Analytics need to be collected at many different levels. Customer actions and interactions not just on our site but through the awareness and service channels. The interactions with the brand can provide great data as to cause and effect and ROI

Cognitive Buying Model 2.0

2008-03-31T19:06:00.006-04:00

I've covered the base cognitive buying model in my earlier post. I wanted to continue and examine how and if it had changed by web 2.0.

It looked at how peers and vendors could impact the customer decision throughout the process.

In e-business 2.0, a few things change:

Communications are not one sided. Every communication is interactive where data and opinions get exchanged.
The Peer group definition had expanded to include everyone accessible through the internet that has an experience or an attitude/opinion towards the brand, product or service.
As such, it is not enough for the Vendor to try and manage customer experience as they become peers, you need to manage and have specific information and communication plans for the peers as defined at every stage.

The new model will look something like this:

In the next few posts I'll try to look thoroughly at each step in the process and identify the information and actions that the vendor should be taking at each.

The social web

2008-03-30T13:47:00.002-04:00

In my last post I talked about the changes in internet access, broadband availability, mobile access and some of the expectations companies now face from a savvy connected public.

In addition to these expectations and the attitudes discussed earlier there is a set of social changes that impact the way people research and buy products and services.

The internet has become a social place where people interact, make friends, meet potential dates and keep in touch with social and professional contacts.

The companies that led the web 2.0 wave signify most of the trends in this area and most are in one way or another part of the social web revolution.

The rise and still high popularity of social networks such as MySpace and Facebook (or the recent acquisition of Bebo by AOL) and the ability to easily open you own social network (Ning)
Online video and user generated content on sites such as YouTube
Collaborative editing, crowd sourcing and community content as reflected in the amazing story of Wikipedia and all its imitators.
Professional networks like LinkedIn enable professionals and businesses to make and maintain relationships
Free storage and sharing of links (del.icio.us), pictures (flickr) or files (Google documents)
Blogs
Review and rate everything, from local restaurants and businesses (yelp) to cars (Edmunds)
The dominance of search on the way we look for information (Google)
Popular story aggregators allow the public to decide what should be on top (Digg)

The impacts of these trends on businesses include:

Your brand, products and services are being discussed and reviewed, blogged and digged. Are you aware of what is being said? How can you influence the discussion, what is the right way to respond and how to deal with false or misleading reviews / stories?
Can your business be a social entity? Can it / should it have friends on myspace, pictures on Flickr, a blog and opinions.
Are you interested in a true open dialogue? Are you ready to deal publicly with the good, bad and ugly that will come up?
How to leverage public interest and user generated content?

Two sample stories from businesses that are trying to deal and adjust to the new reality.

The first comes courtesy of my wife who wrote a long post about it on her blog.

Bond number 9 is a trendy and relatively new perfume company, that tries to establish a brand using New York landmarks, neighborhoods and artists as the source for their perfume names and designs.

"It seems that Bond no. 9 has not only a love for my favorite city and its icons but also a huge case of hubris. Apparently, this company, who has used the names of nearly every NYC landmark for its perfumes, is now the owner of abstract nouns and concepts. Case in point: Artisan perfumer Liz Zorn got a nastigram from Bond no.9 attorneys, threatening to take her to the cleaners because her fragrance "Peace on Earth" is an infringement on Bond's right to the word "Peace" that was established in their "Scent of Peace" perfume (which to my nose is a total bore, but that's beside the point).

It looks like this isn't a new tactic for Bond no. 9. According to posts made by Anya McCoy (here and here), another artisan perfumer and owner of Anya's Garden, had a similar experience before she discontinued her Riverside perfume (Bond no. 9 also offer a perfume called Riverside Drive, and apparently they own that part of Manhattan, though I suspect the Donald might argue with this statement).

What they don't own is my money, which will be spent elsewhere."

Similar reactions from other bloggers and community sites created a huge backlash against the company. As a response, Bond tried to defend themselves unsuccessfully creating further damage.

The second example is from Jeep. A brand that had adjusted in a smart way to web 2.0 and social networks. Their strategy was deliberate and according to Rob Hecht at Media 2.0 included the following:

1) portals (using contextual/Google and behavioral/AOL targeting)

2) an IM avatar development program

3) online video
4) virtual "test drives"

5) an online fantasy football sponsorship w/print component
6) ads on free music download sites with viral marketing (pass this song on to your friends capability)
7) a TV spot (new)
8) microsites
9) a new campaign site which was redesigned to host rich-media offerings like video vignettes

10) traditional TV with product placement
11) events and bowl games
12) print ads

The accompanying site is a good example of doing it right.

Cognitive Buying process 2.0 - Introduction

2008-03-29T23:29:00.007-04:00

So how did the Cognitive Buying process change in the last few years and what should an e-business 2.0 be doing to address and optimize their actions as the vendor?

First let's take a look at the primary changes Internet usages in the US has gone through over the last 8 years and the specific set of requirements and expectations they present any organization that tries to keep up.

We'll then examine more specific changes web 2.0 technology and attitudes introduce.

The PEW Internet research & American Life project offers free research on internet usage and is a great source for anyone who wants to know more of the usage trends.

According to its March 2007 study 71% of American households have internet connection, and 47% have broadband connection.

A more recent study from March 2008 looks at adoption rate of mobile internet devices:

Most Americans now expect to have access to the Internet at any time and from anywhere using a variety of devices to do so. They also expect it to be fast and secure.

In addition, we want to be presented with a wealth of relevant information, tools that enable us to accomplish every possible task easily.

We like to view / listen to media and get our news and entertainment online but we also like to express ourselves through blogs, opinions, content we create and we like to share everything.

The Internet is now a social tool. We use it to interact, make friends, meet people and dates, participate in a community and be part of networks.

We expect to be able to research, compare and buy everything online. Order any service online and make changes to it. We like to report every problem and get it resolved. Now.

For many of the younger demographic who grew up with the internet, internet is a utility they can't live without.

I think that what primarily changed are our expectations. We expect a high level of access, quality and service. We are disappointed when that is not the case. Businesses have to meet those standards in order not to disappoint prospects and customers.

A business needs to answer positively all of these questions:

Does my website provide a wealth of relevant information that is easy to find?
Are answers to 90% of the questions people may ask available online?
Do I provide all the tools users may need to do business with me? Are there any manual / phone / in-person processes that can be streamlined?
Are we fast enough? Not just in our sites and tools but in our response and information.
Do we support all devices, media formats and access speeds? How do we look and work on a phone?
Do I provide feedback to users on every step on their interaction?
Do I provide ways for users to interact, share, communicate things, and express themselves?
Is my site perceived as secure and reliable? Are people confident their information will remain confidential?
Is the user experience from the homepage to the service section reflective of the quality of my brand?

And this is just for parity, not for market leadership or cutting edge differentiating services.

Cognitive buying experience

2008-03-28T14:56:00.013-04:00

A Gallop pollster called me last night asking if I’d mind answering a customer survey about my experience at my bank’s local branch. Now, I don’t like my bank. And I spent 10 minutes on the phone explaining exactly why. While their online experience is reasonable, the branch is not and I try not to go there unless I have to. They still charge me their high account fees to pay for these tellers and real estate. I’m seriously considering moving everything to an online bank. HSBC is doing a smart move branding their online bank differently and offering the real advantages of both.

I think many companies are still struggling with e-business 1.0 channel integration and service segmentation.

Image Credit: idle minutes, an illustrated blog

E-business 2.0 requires taking these practices to a higher level. Technical and social changes of the last 8 years have to be accounted for.

Prevalence of web 2.0 attitudes I wrote about earlier
Influence and communication circles are expanding. Like in the classic AIDS commercial, every customer you touch, you have the potential to touch their friends and their friends’ friends. Now at internet speed.
Social Web. Using the internet is not a solitary experience anymore. People surf together, buy together, twitter all day and share everything.
Web applications are expected to be faster, sleeker and with a rich user interface
Available anywhere. With improved browsers in phones, the phone with its small and limited browser is fast becoming a popular and growing way to surf the web.
Data, data everywhere. The proliferation of interaction channels is making it harder than ever to collect and analyze it.
Service orientation: whether you call it web as a platform, software as a service, service oriented architecture or just web services, web applications are expected to be social too.

Had the cognitive buying experience changed? How should all these changes affect the forward thinking enterprise?

The classic AIUAPR model (Awareness, Interest, Understanding, Attitudes, Purchase, Repeat purchase) can be expanded upon to include the web 2.0 concepts and create a solid backbone for the e-business 2.0 infrastructure. David Mercer in his book Marketing has laid a great foundation adding a few very relevant steps into this process

Susceptibility addresses the set of activities that promote a brand and makes the consumer susceptible to the advertising that brings specific brand and product awareness.

Understanding is added to the Interest as research and comparison are becoming an essential step in the purchasing decision

Legitimacy is ever more important as identities of sellers have to be credible enough to result in a transaction. A strong off-line brand name, heavy advertising or good seller feedback on eBay will make it easier for customers to trust the seller.

The Repeat purchase step was divided into the components that determine if the customer will come back

Experience encompasses the shopping experience, satisfaction / experience with the product or service and even the experience with customer service. As more sites and tools allow customers to share their experiences, the impact of positive or negative experiences is magnified beyond the immediate circles and is kept for posterity.

Loyalty is the culmination of all brand efforts to make you a frequent customer who is loyal to the brand and is a brand ambassador to others.

David Mercer also suggests adding Peers and Vendor activities in parallel to the customer process and examines how they influence the decision making process

Peers

Customer

Vendor

While this model greatly expands the basic AIUAPR model it addresses the reality e-business 1.0

In order to expand this model into e-business 2.0 each component needs to be examined separately.

More to come.

E-business 2.0 part 2

2008-03-27T17:46:00.003-04:00

In the standard model, the enterprise has 4 main groups of constituents: Customers, Partners, Suppliers and Employees. An e-business 2.0 company needs to examine each of these audiences and identify the gaps and opportunities the new attitudes and technologies present.

In accordance with the open and agile nature of the web 2.0, solutions should be loosely coupled and modular rather than monolithic, and therefore easier to implement based on specific company priorities.

That said, there is no need to discard the huge investments made in ERP, CRM and corporate data warehouses and BI systems that are essential and need to be the center from which new applications spur, get data and send data. Whether through API, Web Services or any other mechanism, data needs to be collected shared and analyzed. Analysis could and should be available to line managers and making these systems agile yet integrated is probably the toughest challenge the e-business 2.0 implementation will face.

A comprehensive e-business 2.0 approach can address each audience separately. It can also look at improving the current channels and address opportunities for completely new channels of business.

Customers: though the customer lifecycle of Marketing Sales and Service had not changed, each of its components have gone through a substantial transformation.

Marketing –> E-awareness. E-marketing has evolved and now includes many elements that used to be part of PR. We can now look at e-PR and e-marketing as the e-awareness arm of the business, charged with making all of potential e-customers aware of the brand, product or service and if possible, willingly transmitting the same messages to their friends (both electronically and verbally)
Sales -> e-commerce, social commerce, and mobile commerce. E-commerce now challenges the conventional sale channels and offers new opportunities. Are your products sold direct? Through resellers? Through customers to or with their friends? Where people buy can blur the lines between brick and mortar and the e-store. Consider this: a customer walks into Best Buy, checks out external HD options, goes on their iPhone and finds reviews and recommendations, decides what product to buy, finds the same product for less at Circuit City, purchases through the phone browser, locates the nearest store and goes by to pick it up. Is the store now an advanced showroom and pickup place? On the other end, the e-commerce store had become more than a catalog. It is a discovery, exploration and evaluation platform where the purchase is the culmination of a research operation at the e-store.
Service -> e-service, self service and Social Service. Since it promised one of the first cost-savings opportunities, there was a rush early on to move as much as possible of the customer service online through self service portals, IVR systems and the like. While some have seen success, security and digital signature issues as well as challenges of accessing customer data and executing transaction are still holding many companies back. Few industries have tapped into customer to customer service but the potential there is significant. A healthy and active customer community has centered around software and infrastructure products where companies like Adobe provide resources, local user groups and users help and support each other. Other companies can learn and implement similar strategies

As we can see from these short summaries, e-business 2.0 requires a company to realize it has limited control over how its products and services are promoted, evaluated, purchased and experienced. Trying to fight these forces can result in distrust and consumer backlash.

Employees:

An e-business 2.0 organization that had embraced the principles of openness, transparency and collaboration will naturally look at ways to leverage the same ideas internally, commonly referred to as enterprise 2.0 or the Social Enterprise. It deals mostly with how information and knowledge are shared and used within an organization.

Does the upper management blog regularly on the state of the business and future directions or are news spread as rumors in dark corridors?
Is the intranet a pile of old-unused content or are there active discussion regarding clients, projects and ideas?
Are your knowledge management and e-learning systems stale and unused or are they the center of activity and constant improvements?
Can you tap into contacts, skills and knowledge of people around the company?

The technology to support enterprise 2.0 is mostly available while the implementation and cultural changes in organizations still make it a tough sell.

It is no great secret that internal culture and values reflect out to customers, partners and suppliers. Therefore, implementing a solid enterprise 2.0 mindset will, even if not delivering increased productivity and cost savings, a readiness and agility to embrace the e-business 2.0 opportunities and challenges.

Partners:

In e-business 2.0, the company strives to create a true partnership with their resellers, distributors, ISV, SI, merchandisers, or after-market providers. While it was always a good business practice to make partners an integrative part of the R&D, marketing, sales and service organizations, an e-business 2.0 organization should try to create the same culture of openness and transparency with its partners as it does with customers or employees. Partner communities can be created where the interaction between the company and partners makes the partner feel valued and their opinions are solicited and listened to. An active community can create synergies between different partners and create an innovative hotbed that can result in new ideas and services.

Suppliers

While most companies may look at suppliers as part of a supply chain system that reduces the interaction and the relationships with them, a smart e-business will demand the same 2.0 attitude it provides its clients, employees and partners from its suppliers.

Conclusions:

Despite web 2.0 being around for the last 4 years, not a lot had penetrated the business community and a simple gap analysis will show that in managing all four constituents, most companies have a long way to go.

If a e-business 2.0 attitude is adopted, a roadmap for creating the e-business 2.0 can be created and implemented. I’ll try to break that down in the next few posts and examine in more detail how it can be achieved.

Where is E-Business 2.0 hiding?

2008-03-26T17:02:00.008-04:00

Where is E-Business 2.0?

Ever since the advent of the Internet in the early to mid 90’s, businesses have taken advantage of the new set of technologies and communication channels to grow their business through what has become known as e-business. The leading concept of the late 90’s had been put on ice as the new wonder kids, web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 get all the attention these days.

There has been little written and discussed about e-business 2.0 and how can companies take advantage of all the technical and cultural advancements of the last few years to grow their business and their competitive positioning.

With all its hype, cool startups and sexy conferences, web 2.0 still baffles many business people who see it as a playground for kids (MySpace, Facebook, YouTube) or a get-rich scam for young entrepreneurs and VC’s. Many who have been through Bubble 1.0 would rather wait until the web 2.0 fad disappears to see what is left standing. Tim O’reilly has provided what many see as the most comprehensive definition of web 2.0. And while his explanation is very thorough, it is also technical in nature.

My favorite definition comes from Ian Davis who wrote:

“Web 2.0 is an attitude, not a technology. It’s about enabling and encouraging participation through open applications and services. By open I mean technically open with appropriate APIs but also, more importantly, socially open, with rights granted to use the content in new and exciting contexts.”

In my opinion, web 2.0 is indeed defined as an attitude that can be personal or organizational. A web 2.0 organization adds specific terms and values to its code of conduct and sets priorities and incentives to promote them.

I see web 2.0 attitudes, or what I like to call the web 2.0 spirit, as made of the following attitudes:

Open: you don’t have to share your source code to be open but from the application to the users, the approach is open. Easy to integrate with, easy to add to. Built on sharing. Open to new ideas, flexible, agile, simple, and diverse.
Social: some may dispute this term as web 2.0 is not just about people but about systems as well, but my viewpoint is that it works all the same. It is about relationships, trust, playing well with others, give and take, respect of each player and of the social order that is in place.
Interactive: the interaction among users and active participation is a core element of the web 2.0 spirit. Reading and writing were there all along but the ability to respond and engage in discussions, post reviews, comments, thoughts and ideas. Agree and disagree. Provide a different point of view. Support and promote. Value input in whatever form it is provided.
Transparent: Do not: hide, lie, spin, manipulate, threaten, or intimidate. The Internet walls are non existent and everything you say or do, internally or externally will be exposed. Therefore: Share as much information as possible, acknowledge mistakes and explain decisions.
Collaborative: Listen, encourage opinions and group decisions. True collaboration is a tremendous thing producing a result much greater than the sum of the parts. It can only flourish in a nurturing environment.

Andrew McAfee at Harvard likes to add the term Emergent, noting that out of many local interactions as web 2.0 facilitates, comes higher level structures. I’ll expand that definition to include emergence of order and structure out of the seemed chaos that is online interaction. It is the transcendence of web 2.0 communities that created Wikipedia.

So now, show of hands. Has your organization embraced the web 2.0 spirit? Chances are that unless you are working for a web 2.0 startup, the most you have seen is the introduction of a limited corporate blog or a Wiki’s coming up on your intranet.

Many companies have a deep rooted problem with the web 2.0 spirit. It contradicts some of the fundamental principles of corporate mentality and therefore risky to undertake. In my experience very few companies have truly bought into this attitude and at the most are paying lip service by implementing some basic enterprise 2.0 applications to replace their failed and unused Intranets and KM systems.

Bob Warfield provided a very insightful discussion as to the reasons companies are wary of embracing web 2.0:

The headlong rush the Web brings to expose everything to everyone scares the heck out of most corporate types. Their two biggest requests for Web 2.0 initiatives are Governance and Security, and the reasons for it are exactly what we’ve been discussing. It isn’t just that they have “control issues”. There are sound business reasons why controls have to be in place.

Morale: Do we really want everyone to know how poorly some initiative is going? How will it help to tell those who can’t make a difference and would only be depressed by the knowledge? Is it fair to expose some internal squabble that was mostly sound and fury signifying nothing? Won’t that just unfairly tarnish some otherwise good people’s reputations and make them less effective?

Governance: Is the information legal and appropriate for everyone to know in this age of SOX and Securities Laws?

Competitive Advantage: Do I want to risk giving my competitors access to key information because I’ve distributed it too broadly?

Still, the web 2.0 spirit as reflected in the actions, habits and expectations of users WILL impact the way companies do business. Some of the most important trends include:

Loss of control: as mentioned above, companies no longer have absolute control over their brand, products and services and how they are portrayed. From rumor sites to product reviews and fake commercials, people have many more ways to learn about you and form opinions.
Opinions matter. 68% of shoppers read products reviews before making a purchase.
Wider influence circles. Information (good and bad) can quickly spread through influence and social circles.
Transparency is expected and recent cover-up attempts by companies like Merck and Bear Stearns were not tolerated.

Companies will have to adapt because the old practices are getting them in trouble and new opportunities for leadership position are being lost due to lack of clear web 2.0 corporate strategy or what we would call e-business 2.0

An e-business 2.0 company will embrace this new attitude and apply it to the core processes that are used to run the business. I think this change and not enterprise 2.0 is the real impact that web 2.0 will have on business.

Continue to part 2