Building Brand With Web 2.0 Tools

October 5, 2007 at 1:17 pm · Filed under Social Computing, Social Media, Web 2.0, mashups

If you’re familiar with Twitter, you’ve probably figured out there’s some interesting things you can do with these types of SMS-based apps. If you’re a power Twitterer all of you know it’s way more than "what am I doing". Jaiku’s the other one, and although essentially both provide the same capabilities, I give an aesthetic edge to Jaiku for its slick looking badges.  That aside, while working on a community project yesterday, we started thinking about how these tools can benefit the business. If you extrapolate what’s being done  by some of the big brands, it’s pretty easy to see the evolution. Take ZDNet for instance. Their approach aggregates all of their blogs into one Twitter feed. Using something like TwitKu, (screenshot below) I get a pulse of what ZDNet is covering that hour. And ZDNet knows most people won’t have the inclination to subscribe to all of their blogs, so they give us options. That’s an important notion when building your business case. Always give the user options. If you want to be a media company, act like one. Show me how to consume, repurpose, mashup, and deliver your content not just in ways you want but ways I want.

Other companies, including Dell and the NYTimes, also use  use Twitter to push out all sorts of content, from product updates and discounts to industry information and news. And isn’t it a bit ironic that the NY Times is so prolific on Twitter? They came across as a skeptic back in April.

So know that we know there’s some real-world scenarios for this stuff, the question becomes how to best incorporate these communication tools into an integrated and cohesive marketing strategy? I’d suggest start by stripping away all the Web 2.0 monikers and buzzwords and boil it down to content and communication. From there think about what everyone else is thinking about. How do I come up with creative ways to distribute my content? After that, think about how to be a facilitator. Once a brand becomes a trusted information source or content provider, conversations happen. Tools like Twitter and Jaiku can drive those conversations.  And conversations build brand.

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Are Microsoft and IBM Your Future Social Media Vendors?

September 12, 2007 at 4:55 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, IBM, Microsoft, Social Computing, Social Media, Web 2.0, enterprise software

2008 will no doubt be a telling year in the corporate social media and Web 2.0 space. And if this CIO Insight story is any indication, the race will again pit David v. Goliath. But what’s different this time around? Will the Web 2.0 shakeout be any different than all the other enterprise software battles?

What happens in 2008?

Here’s some thoughts:

• The incumbent enterprise software vendors have the edge in total dollars spent in 2008 as they give away what Web 2.0 functionality they have.
• Pure-play social media and Web 2.0 vendors get out of the gate faster because their platforms are easier to stitch together — the gap shortens in late 2008 as acquisitions are made.
• Bigger vendors will provide the underlying architecture and deep integration to existing apps.
• Enterprises will learn that mixing and matching Web 2.0 technologies with existing apps provides real value - advantage upstarts.
• Pure-play social media vendors will quickly evolve their alliance strategies — the lines of coexistence or competition will be blurred.
• Enterprise software vendors will go wide while smaller vendors go deep. In other words, the small guys will do one or two things really well and the big boys will do a lot of stuff kind of well.
• Vertical expertise will take precedence very soon. Advantage: enterprise software vendors.
• Bigger vendors will sneak web 2.0 inside the enterprise. You’ll get the content repository from IBM — and it’ll include publishing and subscription capabilities, AKA blog and RSS.
• Pure-plays will rely more heavily on 3rd-party services..similar to the early enterprise portal days and all those clunky content gadgets.

But don’t count out the current crop of social media upstarts so fast, though. They can still can put their best enterprise foot forward when they have to. Below is Awareness Networks’ (formerly iUpload) passage marketing to the deer-in-the-headlight IT decision-maker.

..if a corporation deploys separate tools for each form of social media (e.g., blogs, wikis, discussion groups, etc.) they will create disparate islands of information that later will have to be somehow integrated. A common approach to all forms of social media allows an organization to employ the most appropriate form of social media for each business need with the assurance of knowing that the content is re-purposable to any other form. In this mode, a user can generate content in one participation style (e.g., a blog) that later appears in another participation style (e.g., a wiki or a discussion group) . This maximizes the value of the user-generated content and avoids any silos of information.

What else do you see in the coming months?

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Enterprise 2.0 Is Not A Fad

August 23, 2007 at 12:03 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Social Media, enterprise software

KPMG just released a paper titled, Enterprise 2.0: Fad or Future? Nice title, you almost had me. It’s really comical to think a big consulting firm would even hint at the notion of a new set of  technologies being a fad. New technologies mean re-engineering, lots of heavy lifting, and lots of human resources, right? Not necessarily. This enterprise is different than your father’s enterprise. This one is lightweight, it’s flexible, and it ignores long implementations. So why all the fuss over enterprise 2.0 and its older sibling Web 2.0? Most analysts (like Gartner) will tell you it’s because this stuff is gonna  be big business — and soon.

The dollars set to pour into the so-called ”Enterprise Social Software” market  is projected in 2011 to grow from US$ 226 million in 2007 to more than US$ 707 million.

It’s interesting to see the big integrators putting on their best Gen X and Y impressions, all of sudden scrambling to be perceived as thought leaders. The reality is most big consulting firms will ride the enterprise coattails of the major software vendors, comfortably sitting back and cherry-picking the opportunities already seeded by vendors who’ve sprinkled bits and pieces of Web 2.0 throughout their platform.

And for the record, I actually thought the paper was informative, especially the case studies from some of the big brands. What I couldn’t figure out was why the social software categories were so light on content and were mainly geared towards the B2C side. Download the full publication here.

 Listen to the podcast (MP3, 7m48secs, 7.21MB)

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Google CEO Boils Web 2.0 Down to Ajax, Defines Web 3.0

August 8, 2007 at 3:48 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

During a press briefing in Seoul, Google’s Eric Schmidt was asked about the flavors of today’s evolving Web, specifically Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. Before describing Web 2.0 as a “marketing term” and distilling it down to AJAX, Schmidt told the reporter, “as far as Web 3.0, I think you just invented the term.”

Apparently Schmidt’s oversimplification of Web 2.0 has folks amused. I noticed several Twitters ( or is it Tweets?)  within the hour of posting this poking fun at Schmidt’s take.

And while it’s obvious AJAX  improves the way we interact with content on the web, it’s just technology. Web (whatever the number) dot oh won’t be remembered under the brand of any technology. It’ll be remembered in terms of our collective experiences. I can see the nostalgic headlines already, “Web 2.0, The Era We Made Contact” or “Web 2.0, The True User Experience.”

Schmidt went on to guess at what the next rev of the Web might bring, essentially describing a world of lightweight mashups accessible on any device and pulling their data from “the cloud.” He finished by predicting the applications would be distributed virally, through social networks, email, and other forms of electronic communications.

Seen first @ Read/Write Web..YouTube posting by KoreaCrunch

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Still Not Convinced About RSS Behind the Firewall?

August 4, 2007 at 9:54 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, SaaS, Web 2.0

If you’re not, take a look at a recent document I received from  Scott Niesen, head marketer at Attensa. If you don’t know Attensa, you’re in for a treat. Their new feedreader tool sits nicely inside Outlook and brings a unique spin to feed reading via their “River of News” view and AttentionStream™ technology. 

“Through ongoing analysis of AttentionStream™ data, including the time and frequency that feeds are accessed and articles read, deleted and ignored, Attensa displays feeds in a prioritized list based on the likelihood that they will be of interest to the reader. Subscriptions can be displayed in a “River of News” view that simulates a single news feed, regardless of how many RSS feeds”

And Scott and I had a good exchange about sharing some of Attensa’s inner RSS workings. When I told him I should just blog the whole document, he quickly fired back, that “marketing is all about experiments and a little risk.”

Well said.

Cross-posted on WOW Feed

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FAST Customer TauMed Enables Health 2.0 with Search and Social Media

February 14, 2007 at 4:40 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, innovator interviews

One of the best things about the FASTforward conference was seeing how customers have used FAST technology - how they’ve applied it to the real world. I sat down last Thursday with CEO Tauseef Bashir of TauMed, a virtual health community, and got a glimpse of how healthcare information is evolving. This time the evolution is being  driven by social media and powerful search technologies.

(Photo | Tauseef Bashir and Jerry Bowles)

According to some recent stats from TauMed’s PR firm about 10 million Americans go online each day searching for answers to health questions. And to no one’s surprise Health searches are now just as popular as paying bills online, reading blogs, or using the web to find phone numbers and addresses.

With that kind of activity, you can see why there’s an information land grab going on. So Is there room for another WebMD? And how do you compete with the 800 lb. gorilla? Bashir says they’ll do it by improving the quality of information, how that information is delivered and expanding the site’s social networking capabilities. No small task by any stretch.

The beta site, launched in December, is impressive. It’s actually more impressive when you see it go head-to-head with WebMD. During his demo, he showed me some of why there’s so much buzz around search becoming the new interface. When we searched for “MS” (multiple sclerosis) in WebMD’s v1.0 site and asked to see the Web results, we  saw things like Microsoft Corporation and other irrelevant items. Doing the same search in TauMed rendered much more precise results. The other things I liked were the “ask a question” and “HealthShare“ features. Tauseef’s product team uses rich Ajax interfaces to dynamically serve up content, giving the site a clean, interactive feel when searching for data or contributing content for HealthShares. 

Tauseef,a former FAST employee, is passionate about the company’s prospects and knows they’ve got a fight in front of them. He says consumers have short attention spans for fruitless searches and irrelevant information and intends to capitalize on it.  The data mining and contextual analysis is the key, he says, to serving up razor-sharp results and creating a memorable user experience. But search aside, I dug a little deeper on the social networking aspects of TauMed’s community. Apparently, they’ve built their own content management system (CMS) and blog-like capabilities. I couldn’t help but notice how their user profile pages mimic blog features, providing very simple and intuitive interfaces and easy onramps to adding user-generated content. 

The other thing that popped up during the demo was advertisements, mostly from Google. I’m OK with that, but what surprised me was the irrelevancy of certain ads. In the midst of deep-diving for additional multiple sclerosis (MS) information, a political ad obtrusively took over half the side rail in TauMed’s 3 column-ish layout. Suffice to say, Tuaseef quickly pointed out their product team is in the midst of improving their ad-serving backend. He also added TauMed was an early AdMomentum customer, putting much of the platform under rigorous testing and customization.

But let’s face it, as Web 2.0 as TauMed 1.0 is,  they still have a numbers problem. Not the financial kind, but traffic. Outside of mass media advertising, you’ve got  a classic case of a company needing some good ol’ fashioned grassroots and word-of-mouth marketing. Perhaps they should also reach out to other social software providers supplying the resources to companies building intranets, niche communities, and other social-oriented portals. You could even include some of the office 2.0 candidates like ZoHo, CentralDesktop, and others. They too will become more and more dependent on customized content as user bases grow. I guess you could think of it as enabling TauMed to become the de facto health widget.

However it plays out, they’re an interesting company that has a new evangelist.  

Cross-posted @ WOW Feed::Tracking New Media and Technology

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Thoughts On Enterprise 2.0 Adoption

January 31, 2007 at 2:59 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, barriers

I wanted to chip in on the adoption dialogue started a few days ago.
I’d classify my post as a volley based on raw experience and very free form, so bear with me.

The thing I’ve learned the most from my own adoption is that your e2.0 road is paved (or under construction) with all sorts of good intentions. You just have to dive in. Have you tried to explain how you learned to use social bookmarking? Or how you use RSS?
There’s an undeniable simplicity to a lot of this enterprise 2.0 stuff. A lot of it boils down to exposure and a commitment to learn.

Think about why you became an expert on information management or blogging. Was it your quest for knowledge? Was it because your a tinkerer? Or was it your personal goal to make a comeback after failing at so many futile KM projects? Point is, our motivations for recognizing the importance and need for enterprise 2.0 are many and diverse. So taking a crack at what drives e2.0 is a shotgun blast at best. 

Most of what I’ve seen and heard throughout the discussions deals with the traditional enterprise battles we fight everyday. Business case, ROI, technology alignment with business strategy..all relevant but very tired and beaten down. As the beat down continues, I think you’ll see larger forces start to supplant the more traditional triggers that drive corporate adoption.

Larger force #1 - The New Media Breakdown

What I’m seeing is what I’d call a “new media nervous breakdown”. Clients are being pressured by their customers, their next door neighbor, or Joe in marketing to come into the fold. That fold is the internet. And like it or not, putting the web to work for business involves a lot of what we’re classifying as enterprise and web 2.0. It’s no coincidence we recommend so many Web 2.0 approaches to leveraging the web — often they’re the easiest way to take that first plunge.

Larger force #2 - Big software companies

Like it or not the Googles and Microsofts will drive a lot of the enterprise adoption. We’ve already seen the Google effect on everything from search to web-based email and collaboration. You can only ignore the “Docs & Spreadsheets” link in your GMail for so long. Show me someone that’s used Google Docs a few times and I’ll show you someone ready to carry the e2.0 torch. RSS adoption soon will also take a huge leap when users see it baked into every nook and cranny in Vista.

An as far as tips go, mine are:

1. Be an educator. People want to learn. As they learn about what’s changing on the web, they’ll naturally seek out a comfortable starting point.
2. Paint a picture and tell a story. Most folks have used Microsoft Word. Show them how publishing to a blog is akin to creating Word docs.
3. Start small and build value incrementally. We’re all obsessed with speed, but doing it right the first time holds more water. There’s no stopwatch on you.
4. Be painfully clear about the reason you’ve decided to adopt a certain approach.
   HINT: “Better collaboration” isn’t enough. If you can’t describe it in simple business terms, you’re wasting your time.
5. Let go and break stuff. Assuming we’ve done our job, users shouldn’t be able to mess things up under usual circumstances. Once people figure out they can back out of something and its integrity can easily be restored, adoption increases.
6. Show how enterprise 1.0 and 2.0 coexist. We could talk about this one for days. 
   If you show users how their workflow can peacefully live right beside the new gadget on the block, anxiety diminishes and the exploration begins.
7. Don’t discuss or describe capabilities in vendor terms. If you’re telling users the value of what they’re doing lies in “private labeling a b2b MySpace that leverages user-generated content to build community” they’ll probably label you a dotcommer and spew bubble 2.0 connotations.

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What Will Drive Enterprise 2.0 Adoption?

January 8, 2007 at 3:00 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, barriers

I created this widget using the FeedBurner / SpringWidgets solution and (as usual) it got me thinking about the enterprise ramifications. Are widgets the new composite applications?

Once widget building (app dev 2.0 ) moves into the enterprise (Coghead,Teqlo), things start to get real interesting. Giving business users the ability create mashups, integrations, and all sorts of other apps will finally help us break the cycle of proprietary, closed-loop systems with terrible interfaces and poor connectivity.

What I’m wondering is what things (like Widgets) will drive the bottom-up adoption needed for enterprise 2.0 (e2.0) to materialize? Once the notion of “hey, we have the ability to configure and compose this stuff ourselves!” is pervasive, the barriers begin to break down. Couple that user epiphany with the upswing of SaaS and open source and you’ve got some real enterprise 2.0 meat on that bone.

But we know it’s more than just the widgets themselves (technology), it’s about changing the mindset of enterprises, changing their perception. And the enterprise mindset is driven by ROI. Prove it to me we say! But the crux of the challenge these days is referenceable data, things like good ‘ol fashioned case studies. So are we doomed to crash and burn next time we’re pitching the benefits of e2.0 in the boardroom?

When’s the tipping point?

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When Will The Enterprise 2.0 Workflow Take Hold?

December 20, 2006 at 4:35 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

For e2.0’s value to shine, I think we have to get into the psyche of the enterprise business user. By that I mean baking Web 2.0 into the their work process, an Enterprise 2.0 workflow if you will. What we e2.0 evangelists are fighting is good ‘ol fashioned legacy stuff. Legacy culture, legacy technology, and of course the legacy of web 1.0.

And those legacy effects will always (to some degree) be an inhibitor to Enterprise 2.0. Some folks just aren’t very good collaborators. I’m not sure if it’s a generational thing, a geeky thing, or just a predisposition to despise any new technology. Whatever the case, the non-collaborators and general web 2.0 naysayers will be hard to de-throne in enterprises unless we show how work gets done using web 2.0.

Without getting into an ROI discussion ad nauseam, I think it starts with an understanding of “how” the work gets done. Call it process, workflow, tasks, whatever way you describe it, there’s a set of events that trigger other events. As you analyze your processes, all sorts of things begin to crystallize. For one, you see how the information is used to create a work product. Secondly, you see the consumers of  the information and how they interact with it. And perhaps most importantly, you start to see other ways the information can be used to feed other work processes or product.(think Teqlo)

Let’s go a level deeper and use tagging or social bookmarking as an example. Most folks can understand the notion behind tagging, especially those with a more formal background in managing content. Those folks are used to terms like taxonomy, classification, metadata, and indexing. So when you describe a webby way to mark content, their lightbulbs quickly go off. From a client perspective, most of the time I use Technorati to demonstrate how tagging works. There’s a big search engine indexing stuff in near real-time. Got it.

What’s more challenging is describing scenarios where your client can incorporate tagging in the context of a workflow or process. When’s the last time you saw a delicious widget setting nicely beside say, a sales order? It’s at this point where thoughts (or nightmares) of integration, security, and maintenance all begin to rear their ugly heads. Why? I think it’s because most enterprise users haven’t seen the web infiltrate their work environment. By infiltrate I mean a real integration, one where web 2.0 applications become an integral part of their company’s service-oriented architecture (SOA). And what about the ERP providers? When will they start to OEM this stuff? Doesn’t it make sense to embed social bookmarking capabilities into your CRM system? That’s when the enterprise 2.0 workflow takes hold. That’s when Johnny in sales can finally pull his SAP data and tag it for customer support, and marketing.

Hopefully in the near future playing “tag” will evolve into more than just reminiscing about your playground days.

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Is ECM Ready for Enterprise 2.0?

December 14, 2006 at 4:33 pm · Filed under event announcements

With a sea change of influence taking hold in the enterprise content management (ECM) landscape — open source, SaaS, enterprise search and all things web 2.0 — I can’t help but wonder how they’ll affect the overall ECM ecosystem. The aforementioned are all things that are quickly coagulating to compose what many of us call Enterprise 2.0.

ECM customers, vendors, developers, and integrators are all beginning to feel the heat from these purveyors of usability, connectedness, community, and collaboration. How does the saying go? If you can’t beat’em, join’em, right?

I’m not saying the traditional ECM powerhouses will be overtaken by these next generation upstarts, at least not in the traditional, competitive sense. I think the takeover will involve “mindshare”, which will be stolen from the stoic and slow-moving enterprise software vendors that fail to enable and empower those influential end users.

As more enterprise 2.0 initiatives move from the playground to the the boardroom, what type of leader will you need to drive business value from ECM? I’ll contend you’ll not only need someone with classical training in the document and records management world, but someone that understands the emerging trends and applications that ECM infrastructure will (and is slowly starting to) inevitably rely on for expanded functionality.(open source,social media,RSS)

Things like enterprise blogging and wiki platforms are just two solutions that will play a crucial role in the enterprise 2.0 environment. They’ll provide rapid ways to deploy communication capabilities that were typically constrained to client server software and IT’s chokehold.

Think of it like this. What happen’s when the LOB or IT group finishes their initial requirements doc and customer service approaches them wanting to implement a tagging (folksonomy) system to enhance search and retrieval of client data? What about when marketing asks how they can RSS-enable all of the content that’s stored in your web content management (WCM) system. Those are very rudimentary scenarios, but ones that would probably pose considerable challenges for most of today’s enterprises.

If you believe the coming impact of enterprise 2.0, don’t just pepper your ECM team (or any other team) with Web 2.0 consultants and hope the knowledge transfer takes place.

Plan your enterprise 2.0 strategy now. Just do it, two dot oh.

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