Author Archive
by Jerry Bowles
November 12, 2007 at 9:32 am · Filed under
Community, Enterprise 2.0
Is conversational marketing for real or is it an oxymoron? Can large corporations really use social media to build influence and valuable relationships in targeted markets? I believe they can and have been involved over the past several in an effort to test that belief, which is the reason I haven’t blogging much lately.
About six months ago, my business partner Robin Carey and I approached Don Bulmer, head of Industry Influencer Relations at SAP, the major enterprise software firm, with an idea: Let us help you increase your visibility and influence in the small business market by sponsoring an online business community that we are building around the needs and interests of business owners and managers of companies with fewer than 500 employees, and the professionals and experts who advise them.
Our logic was that while SAP offers a full-range of software for the small and midsize company market and has thousands of customers in those categories, it is still perceived by many as a maker of software “for the big guys.” We believed we could help alter that perception by applying some of the lessons of social media and conversational marketing we had learned over the past year or so from developing two prototype communities–Social Media Today and CleantechCollective.
To our delight, Don agreed and SocialMediaTodayLLC had its first paying customer. MyVenturepad is the fruit of that engagement.
We’re “soft” launching today which is another way of saying we’re not quite sure yet whether the wheels are on right or that we’ve remembered to fill the tires. In the software business, this kind of launch is called a “Beta” and what it means is that we want your help and feedback in making this a community that you’ll want to belong to and participate in on a daily basis.
You can do this by signing up for membership (upper right hand corner). Once you get your confirmation e-mail you can click on the link and it will bring you back to this page, already logged in. Click on “My Profile” (upper left) and fill out the information that you want to share and upload a photo of yourself which will appear on your comments and posts. Most of the community features are explained in the How to Use MyVenturepad section.
We’ve assembled a great network of featured bloggers for MVP, including people like Dick Costolo, co-founder and CEO of Feedburner; Verne Harnish, founder of the Young Entrepreneurs’ Organization and the Association of Collegiate Entrepreneurs; Jeff Cornwall, Director of the Belmont University Center for Entrepreneurship; Barry J. Moltz, a member of the Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame, and a growing list of other experts.
We invite you to add your own voice, by commenting on posts, creating your own profile and personal network of connections or even starting your own blog here or adding your existing blog to the MVP content feed.
The site is owned by SocialMediaTodayLLC and we are soley responsible for any shortcomings or screwups that are certain to occur. Our relationship with SAP, and other future possible sponsors, is third-party.
About the name? MyVenturepad is a madeup name based on a combination of the rather obvious “venture” and the less intuitive “pad,” which has multiple meanings–the place where you hang out, a notebook, and–most optimistically for you and for us–a place from which big things are launched.
To help get us started, here’s a special inducement for new members to join MyVenturepad. We’ve ordered a bunch of copies of Seth Godin’s new book Meatball Sundae, which is coming out on December 20. We’ll give a free copy to the first 200 of you who sign up who own, manage or advise a company with fewer than 500 employees, AND fill out your profile page (including your mailing address so we’ll know where to send your book). You’ll also need to check the box that gives us permission to send you stuff at the end of the registration form.
by Jerry Bowles
August 19, 2007 at 6:11 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
File this one under self-serving if you like, but I feel a little like a proud new parent. SMTodaymedia (which is basically me and Robin Carey and a virtual cast of thousands) has just launched a new social community called the Cleantech Collective. It’s similar in concept to our Social Media Today community in that it brings together many of the best, and most neglected, bloggers on the internet on a particular subject (in this case, environmental business issues) and creates an open community around the topic.
The basic notion is that there is a tremendous amount of great information about environmental issues being generated on the web by people who are true experts in the field, but until now there has been no place where it all comes together in the form of one large conversation. By bringing all that great writing and thinking into Cleantech Collective, we hope to build a genuine community of concerned citizens, investors, entrepreneurs, and policymakers that will have have a real impact on the cleantech revolution. Drop by and join in if you’re so inclined.
by Jerry Bowles
August 12, 2007 at 4:17 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Social Computing
Red Herring, the tech industry’s essential source for Silicon Valley venture capital news and buzz during the go-go ‘90s but since fallen on hard times, has just rolled out a new beta online platform that it hopes will reduce computing costs and attract new readers and advertisers through the addition of a number of social community-building features and a new video channel.
“Developing and maintaining a web site like Red Herring can be very expensive,” says webmaster Chris Heimbuck. “Typically, you need a team of developers to build it and then you are pretty much dependent on the team to keep things up and running smoothly. That adds up.”
In addition to cutting costs, editor Scott Morrison wanted to add community-building functionality that would allow readers to engage RH and its writers and editors directly and to add content. He also wanted a solution that would support RedHerring.tv, a new channel of video interviews with leading venture capitalists and CEOs of hot technology startups.
The solution they chose was to move to the Blogtronix platform, which already had the desired social networking and video capabilities built in, and to work with Blogtronix’s development team in Bulgaria to create the more conventional content management system they needed for landing pages.
“The Blogtronix crew did a lot of custom work for us,” Heimbuck says. “They really went that extra mile. As a result, our new site is far more functional and attractive than our old site and it cost far less to develop and maintain.”
Morrison agrees and says he’s looking forward to building a committed and engaged Red Herring community.
“By adding social networking capabilities—like allowing readers to create profiles and blogs–we hope to enable users to engage our brand more deeply and essentially drive the content,” he says. “That’s when it really gets exciting for us.”
by Jerry Bowles
August 3, 2007 at 2:39 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Social Media
Susan Scrupski, one of the brightest (and nicest) people I’ve met in my Enterprise Web 2.0 adventures, recently became Chief of Applied Research at Austin-based BSG Alliance, which bills itself as “as the total platform – from a strategic advisory, business process support, and technology design & deployment perspective – for Next Generation Enterprises, On Demand.”
She and Nick Vitalardi had a conversation earlier this week about blogs, wikis and the rapid adoption of social media in enterprises during which Susan came up with the best list I’ve seen so far of how to be a successful blogger. Some are hers; others came from the collective wisdom of the web. If you’re a blogger, have these tatooed to your wrist immediately:
• My number one message is, “To thine own self be true.” Find your voice – be sincere. For corporate blogs specifically, number one on the list is never lie. From Robert Scoble to the Z-list blogger, all will agree.
• Two, write about your passion and write passionately. Whatever it is that you want to blog about, you have to really put your heart and soul into it or it won’t be credible.
• Three, you really need to participate in the community. Blogging is not a solo activity (though that is probably one of the greatest myths about blogging). Linking and commenting are key to the experience of blogging and really taking flight in the blogosphere. Encourage comments.
• Four, try to be humble, but if you do have a strong point of view on something, bring it on, get it out there, but be prepared to defend your arguments.
• Five, when you reference other bloggers, you should mention them by name as opposed to just linking to them. This is blogger etiquette.
• Six, check your links. Bloggers are very forgiving, but definitely check your links. Also check your spelling and your grammar and probably in that order.
• Seven, don’t ever edit or rewrite something that you wrote in the past. The common courtesy in blogging is to strike through and then rewrite on your blog post, if you have made an error.
• Eight, never delete posts. Never delete something that you’ve written. The rule of thumb in the blogosphere is that if you have committed something to digital ink, it’s there for perpetuity and you can’t go back.
• Nine, use a human voice, not PR speak.
• Ten, keep your posts regular and relatively short. The rule of thumb here is definitely less than 500 words and usually a lot less than that.
by Jerry Bowles
July 26, 2007 at 10:59 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, SAP, Social Media Summit
It’s a cold day in hell pretty rare when a large company invites bloggers to sit in on (and actively participate in) a real working marketing strategy session but SAP, the once reclusive software giant that has embraced social media in a huge way, did just that Tuesday by inviting Jeff Nolan, Jason Wood and myself to join the SAP Social Media Summit in downtown Manhattan.
The meeting was convened by Steve Mann, head of SAP’s Total Customer Experience, Competitive Marketing and Services Marketing functions, who looked amazingly alert for a man who recently became the father of triplets. The goal was to come up with a strategy to build on the success of SAP’s Blogger Relations program, run by Mike Prosceno, which has garnered all kinds of positive support in the enterprise software corners of the blogosphere and for the SAP Developer Network (SDN) and Business Process Expert (BPX) communities, headed by Mark Yolton.
The SDN has doubled in size over the past year to 850,000 members and become a popular community for global geeks who get points (and maybe even a free t-shirt or luggage tag) for participating in forums, answering technical questions, and blogging. The site now has 2,800 active contributors, draws 5,000 forum posts a day, and the average time between post/question to first response is 20 minutes. The BPX community, which had 10,000 early adopters, has now passed 150,000 members.
Although SAP’s social media efforts are among the most advanced I’ve seen among enterprises, they are still young and much of the day-long discussion focused on such basic questions as how far the next phase of social media development within the company should go and how fast, when to look for senior level executive sponsorship, and what existing internal and external initiatives might be best candidates for “socialization.”
I wasn’t able to attend day two but at the end of the first day a consensus seemed to be building toward trying not to make rules that might discourage innovation, accelerating the social media adoption process by trying several test projects to see what works best, and deferring the pursuit of top level “sponsorship” until the program matures a bit more. Having spent a number of years working in big company communications, I found all these ideas to be extremely sensible.
My meager contribution to the proceedings was to suggest that because social media can’t be controlled or directed through traditonal marketing and public relations methods, there will almost certainly come a time when something unexpected happens and the program will need “air cover” from a top executive who has been willing to adopt it as his or her own. Most midlevel large company grassroots initiatives I know about are not there yet, but at the “keep informed, but don’t make responsible for” stage.
I also stressed the importance of living the values that embracing social media implies, which are such rare corporate habits as transparency, honesty, accessibility, and trust. The blogosphere is unforgiving of perceived hypocrascy and reputations can be damaged by social media as quickly as they can be bolstered if there is a gap between what corporations say and what they do.
But, the simple fact that Jeff, Jason and I were in the room (and not asked to sign NDAs) tells me that this is a lesson that SAP’s social media leaders and innovators already understand.
by Jerry Bowles
July 19, 2007 at 9:58 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, SAP, Social Media
Jimmy Breslin’s famous query about the hapless 1962 New York Mets seems apropos of many PR “professionals” these days as they scramble to turn those inviting “Comments” sections of blogs into promotional nuggets for their clients. Many of these nuggets are so blatantly obvious and written in such PR mush that they have the undesired effect of making the companies mentioned (even the innocent bystanders) look silly and manipulative
Here’s an example from Zoli’s Blog yesterday:
Sam writes: Either way you go…without an efficient software infrastructure, we could not have coped with the expansion of the past years. Previously, financial accounting and retail were accommodated by stand-alone applications. A custom interface supported communication between the two applications, which meant that data had to be captured twice or imported a second time.
We realized that at some point in the near future, this type of data handling and storage would no longer support our expanding business and would render the system too inflexible to support the expanding number of product variants. This led to the decision to implement a new solution that could handle everything – now and in the future.
We are in San Diego and were paired up with a company called Tryarc (http://www.tryarc.com/) in Los Angeles. They are a premier SAP business partner. While our first impression was SAP is too much for what we need, Tryarc turned us onto the SAP solution for small and midsize enterprises; it’s called SAP Business One. A subsequent presentation of the product had us convinced. SAP Business One was implemented in just a matter of weeks – in part because the standard functions of SAP Business One matched 95% of our business processes. We implemented an interface to our Web shop using SAP Business One Software Development Kit, enabling incoming Internet orders to flow automatically into the business software.
Now, all enterprise management functions are accommodated in one system. SAP Business One provides entirely new opportunities. The only alternative would have been to invest considerable sums in additional stand-alone solutions. Our infrastructure made this pointless. In addition to being the more economical solution, SAP Business One is more comprehensive. It plays its part in making the processes in the company much more transparent than before. Purchasing and sales processes used to be separate, manual transactions supported by paper forms that were stored in file cabinets and forwarded by hand when required. Today, when an order is created and confirmed, a delivery note and invoice are generated, giving the warehouse the go-ahead for delivery. In parallel, the transaction is shown as an open item in accounting.
If the merchandise is in stock, customers can receive their order immediately.
Finally, each department can access this system and exchange data with the other divisions. The result is a significant improvement in the internal information flow. This is particularly important for an enterprise like ours that covers all of the manufacturing steps – from development and production to sales and technical support. Today, the time between placing an order and delivery averages less than 24 hours. The improvements delivered by SAP Business One lay the groundwork for the continuing growth of our company. For example, we are planning to exchange price and delivery data with its customers via an electronic data interchange interface in the near future.
The enterprise wide system is an investment worth it’s weight in gold. We could not be happier with SAP and the people at Tryarc who helped us get up and running.
The link on Sam’s name goes back to Tryarc so this is likely a clumsy attempt to plant a fake testimonial as a legitimate comment. It’s embarrassing for Tryarc and for SAP, who had nothing to do with it and wouldn’t have because they’re one of the smartest companies out there on the social media front.
Zoli, who has a lot more patience than most, offered some sound advice in response:
Sam, or whoever you are. I will not delete this comment, because you do make a point about the value of integrated systems, which, as a former SAP-er I appreciate. But generally speaking, this would be considered spam since:
- It’s a canned long sales pitch not directly relevant to the subject (OK, a tiny bit relevant, very remotely).
- You misrepresent yourself. Next time, if you pretend to be a customer, you might want to drop some detail of “your” business, that would actually support your long pitch.
Last but not least, I used to run businesses like Tryarc, and I don’t think spam is the best way to market yourselves.
One more example (hat tip to Jeff Nolan). This is how Ben Popken, an editor at The Consumerist reacted to a planted comment yesterday:
Death to Sockpuppets
Stay Out Of Our Comments, PR Douchebags
Regarding this morning’s “Bank Of America Wins, Buys Chicago’s LaSalle Bank,” commenter “Stankwell,” whose first and only comment was up today, wrote:
LaSalle customers should be happy. Among other things, they’re gaining access to world-class online banking and a coast-to-coast branch and ATM network.
As to charitable giving: BofA is a monster — the good kind! Evidence shows that local donations go up considerably under the new regime. Ask any informed person in Boston or San Francisco.
Talking points much? Nice try. Seriously. You almost sound like a human. But no. BANNED.
Considerably less charitable than Zoli, for sure, but Popken does offer a piece of advice later that PR people should have stenciled on their wrists: “Slogans and marketing-speak glow like ugly neon because they are phony. This is an anti-phony web site for consumers. It wasn’t so much what was said, but how it was said.”
There is absolutely no reason why PR people can’t be part of the conversation but, they have to to to learn to play by the new rules. Be transparent, lose the jargon, and add something of real value.
by Jerry Bowles
July 11, 2007 at 9:25 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Social Media
You knew it was only a matter of time. Techrigy Inc., a Rochester, New York startup, has launched a new “social media compliance product” called SM2 that scans through a company’s intranet servers to find social media, likes blogs, running internally, as well as the internet externally to find employees talking about the company from their blogs or wikis from home. You heard right, it tracks what you say from your computer in your house.
As a service, Techrigy ties into search engines like Technorati, to look for potentially sensitive information published by a company’s employees. It then catalogues policy violations and provides notifications to the company’s enforcers in real time and indexes all the detected social media into a central repository for record retention purposes. (Read, if we get sued or you say something nasty about the company or your boss, your ass is grass.)
What makes this service different from standard e-mail monitoring tools that are widely used in business organizations already is that SM2 also keeps track of what you’re doing away from the workplace. Understandably, this makes people who still care about free speech and civil liberties (and I’m one of them) very unhappy.
Techrigy president Aaron Newman’s rationalization is that many companies are so paranoid that employee bloggers will create legal problems or reveal insider information that the alternative to SM2 is to ban social media altogether. He points to a white paper that reads, in part:
We strongly believe in the freedom of expression and any company that would try to restrict that freedom would likely not retain talented employees very long. However, the freedom of expression does not apply to revealing trade secrets, sharing proprietary company intellectual property, sexual harassment, or breaking other company or organizational policies.
Organizations should not leave it to employees to decide if and how blogging is acceptable. Without a set of guidelines to clearly tell when someone steps too far over the line, the result is the Wild Wild West. The vast majority of employees will use common sense when blogging. However, best practices require an organization to not only “trust” but also “verify.”
As much as I would like to think otherwise, I suspect Techrigy is going to be a bit hit–as long as they promise to keep their customer list a secret. This is the kind of thing that could easily boomerang into a public relations nightmare. What company wants the world to know it doesn’t trust its employees?
by Jerry Bowles
June 28, 2007 at 2:55 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, SaaS, Web 2.0
The Enterprise Web 2.0 revolution has been a godsend to small and midsized companies. Inexpensive, web-based tools and services mean the little guys now have access to professional office tools that rival those used by the Fortune 500–at a fraction of the cost. Think Thinkfree, Zoho, Google Apps, and literally hundreds of other web office purveyors whose innovation and effort has made the web a more effective and friendly place for business transactions for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and their customers.
FreshBooks, provider of a popular online invoicing and time-tracking service now used by more than 180,000 business users, wants to make the web even friendlier. The four-year-old Toronto-based firm today released its API and opened the door for application designers, businesses, services companies, and users to integrate the FreshBooks’ billing platform into what it hopes will be an entirely new category of products, features, and solutions for enhancing and streamlining productivity, workflow, sales, CRM, project management, and invoicing.
Application/service integrators can incorporate FreshBooks APIs into existing and new products to extend functionality, including timers, project planners, and desktop widgets. Services providers, such as ISPs, Web apps, wine, book or other product of the month clubs, with an existing sales infrastructure can use the API to add a professional-quality billing component. Tech savvy customers can also integrate FreshBooks functionality into their current workflow.
“Over the last four years, we have learned a lot about what small businesses and their customers need in order to improve the workflow, customer service and billing process,” said Mike McDerment, CEO of FreshBooks. “By making our API available, we’re helping other businesses enhance the process for delivering professional invoices over email and ground mail, efficiently tracking accounts receivable, cordially managing disputes, recording payment histories to ensure peace of mind for customers, and collecting payments online from customers.”
I spoke with Sunir Shah in FreshBooks’ Market and Communtiy Development yesterday and he told me the release of the API has three primary targets:
- import/export from existing applications, like QuickBooks.
- improving the workflow of our existing customers, through things like desktop widgets
- and the big one, providing a 21st century, professional quality invoicing and accounts receivable system for SaaS and other subscription-based services.
FreshBooks is already widely used by legal professionals, PR/marketing firms, advertising agencies, nurses, project managers, contractors, freelancers, consultants, virtual assistants, journalists, technicians, developers, web designers, graphic designers, and others who, among other things, love the idea of being able to bill clients the same day a project is finished rather than having to wait until the end of the month to squeeze an invoice out of a complicated spreadsheet or software-based accounting program.
This looks like another very smart move by our friends from the Great White North. The developers community is here.
by Jerry Bowles
June 27, 2007 at 2:39 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing
Is Linkedin in play?
Most of the recent flurry of reporting about Facebook has focused on the impact that its wildly successful foray into the world of adult membership is having on MySpace but there are signs that it is also having an effect on LinkedIn, the original social network for business users.
The signs are there, beginning with a series of executive changes being announced this week. Yesterday, the company named Steve Sordello, formerly of Tivo, as its new CFO. Tomorrow, it will announce that Patrick Crane, formerly of the Yahoo! Inc. Network Division where he headed up several key products, including the launch of Yahoo! Answers, is its new Vice President of Marketing. Crane’s mandate is to help head up LinkedIn’s first general marketing push with initiatives designed to build the community beyond its current eleven-million users. (Memo to PR people: if you want me to keep a secret, write “embargoed until …”) on the release.
More significantly, some Wall Street types I know and generally trust tell me that there are discussions going on between LinkedIn and one of the oldest and most respected family-run business publishers. (Okay, I’ll make it easy for you, McGraw-Hill.)
I think it would be a great move for both parties.
by Jerry Bowles
June 25, 2007 at 8:57 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing
The kerfluffle over Federated Media’s hamfisted attempt to obscure the line between advertising and editorial is neither trival, as Michael Arrington suggests, or some kind of of noble experiment in bringing advertisers “into the conversation,” as John Batelle would have it in his downright laughable defense of the practice. All successful news publications, online and off, develop a trust relationship with their readers which is based on those readers’ belief that what they are getting is the publication’s best sense of the facts, unencumbered by deliberately obscured agendas like advertising money. In this case, Federated Media pushed the line and the writers who agreed to be used in that manner deserve to lose credibility because of it.
That’s why there exists in all trustworthy print publications what is generally referred to as a separation of “church and state.’ And I can assure you that it is strictly enforced. Over the past 25 years, I have written and/or produced maybe 150 advertorials–those ugly little hybrid mixes of text and advertising–for Fortune, Forbes, and Business Week. Combined, I suspect they produced more than $100 million in ad revenue. This would make me a success story in most companies but the truth is I have never met a Forbes or Business Week editor. I know one editor at Fortune that I haven’t seen or spoken to for 10 years and although some of my most successful “sections” appeared when John Huey was editor there, I met him only a couple of years ago because he rents the apartment next to mine. I’m not sure he even knows I’m one of the mercenary trolls who made him look like a hero although he did admit to another rep I know that there was “a lot of money to made in picking up garbage.”
In publications that care about editorial integrity and regard it as their most valuable asset, ad salesmen do not speak to editors and vice versa. They don’t take meetings together; they don’t lunch together; their offices are deliberately separated. No self-respecting reporter ever set foot in an ad agency unless it was to interview someone for a story.
In print publications, advertorials are required to be clearly labeled “Advertisement” and they are written, produced, and designed separately from the magazine or newspaper itself. There are also strict rules for informing advertisers that what they are buying is advertising and not editorial.
This is how it should be or else there is no point in pretending there is something called journalism that can be trusted to put the reader’s interests in truth, fairness and accuracy above all other considerations. Over time, this becomes a reputation and even, if I may be naive enough to suggest, a positive contribution to society. It’s why I trust the reporting of the Wall Street Journal, for example, although I wouldn’t have the opinion pages in my outhouse. It’s why ad agencies don’t lean on great publications to do squirrely things. It’s why Rupert Murdoch must never, ever be allowed to own the Journal, or the NYT or the Washington Post.
Michael Arrington has to decide whether he wants to be an editor or a publisher because no one can effectively be both. And, I do know that if you produce a publication that a lot of people trust and want to read, advertisers will come–on your terms, not theirs.
As for Batelle and his fine line of bullshit about making advertisers part of the conversation, most readers are sophisticated enough to realize that the Microsofts and Ciscos of the world don’t want to have a conversation; they want to sell them stuff, and that ad agencies like FM are simply doing what marketers do–pimping for their clients and trying to turn trusted writers and sources into endorsement bitches.
RELATED POSTS
-No related posts
by Jerry Bowles
June 17, 2007 at 7:13 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Social Computing, Web 2.0
Now it can be told. For the past few months, one of my favorite social software startups, Blogtronix, has been working with publishing giant Reuters to create a new online community around environmental markets called ReutersInteractive, which quietly opened in beta last week. For those of us who are fans and charity users (Social Media Today runs on Blogtronix), the demands of the Reuters project on a small, growing company has meant having to wait for the long-promised release of a major update of the Blogtronix platform.
I’m still waiting for my own setup, but having had a few days now to play with the updated version on ReutersInteractive, I have to say the wait was worth it. The platform’s social networking functions, particularly, have been greatly enhanced and make Blogtronix a much stronger prospect in the community-building space.
If you’ve read some of my previous posts, you may already know that I’m a huge fan of Blogtronix, which is the Swiss Army knife of collaboration/publishing platforms. Other companies offer blogging, wiki, workgroup, RSS, social networking and web publishing software but Blogtronix is the only one I know that does it all. Granted, it does some of these tasks better than others.
For example, it is especially awesome for an aggregation site like Social Media Today because it allows me to set up an “Autopost” function for each contributor that automatically pulls their updated feeds into a preview area where an editor—in this case, me—can quickly review them and select the ones that are on target for the site and delete the ones that aren’t. It takes about 15 minutes three or four times a day to review the new input from about 50 blogs and select material to publish—something that would have been a full-time job for two people in the old world of print.
On the other hand, the old version that I’ve been using for the past six months had many built-in social networking features (the ability of users to create profiles, comment, rate posts, and post directly, for example) but they were hard to find and not clearly marked. In addition, users could not build their own customized network or communicate directly and immediately with each other. There was no “Forum” feature.
The new version addresses the missing elements and makes the interface much more “social.” Comments now appear directly under posts and note the placement of the “Rating” and “Add Comment” links on posts:
The updated user profile page lets community members add connections, build customized teams, subscribe to RSS feeds and communicate instantly with each other. The page also offers a “Posts” and “Spreadsheets” view of the user, as well as a “Profile.”
I’ll have more to say about the new Blogtronix upgrade when I’ve had a chance to use it for awhile but check out ReutersInteractive for a good preview. And, see the movie.
by Jerry Bowles
June 12, 2007 at 11:15 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
One of the many reasons things have been quiet around here lately is that my longtime friend and sometime collaborator Robin Fray Carey have been sorting out exactly how we might add value (and perhaps make a couple of bucks) in the social media consulting marketplace.
There is no shortage of talent out there but I like to think Robin and I come to the task with some unique qualifications. Over the past 20 years, separately and together, we have sold somewhere between $50 million and $100 million in advertising and produced and written what is now fashionably called “paid content” around dozens of topics for–at different times–Fortune, Forbes and Business Week. We have worked directly with at least a quarter of the Fortune 500 companies, helping them tell their stories and achieve their marketing goals. I also had a long career in corporate communications.
I started blogging three or four years and one of my early projects was building a very active and influential (according to Technorati) community called Sequenza21 around composers and musicians involved in contemporary classical music. This was before the words “online social community” were commonly heard and the site won an ASCAP award as best internet music site in 2005. I started writing about social media here a couple of years ago and, together, Robin and I launched Social Media Today at the beginning of this year. Her SMT webinars have been very successful. We have in the pipeline communities involving clean tech, SMEs, and CMOs.
In short, we understand the needs of companies and know how they traditionally communicate. We understand what makes online communities succeed or fail and have decided to offer our services as a new business called SMTodaymedia.
we have developed some guidelines that will give you a flavor of our approach:
The Five Principles of Successful BtoB Social Communities
- Design and build your community to achieve a specific business purpose. Want to increase sales in a specific category or market? Generate leads? Build reputation with influential constituencies? What we call “purpose-built.” If you’re doing it just because everyone else is and hoping for the best, that’s not a good reason.
- Make it exclusive. Decide in advance who you want to become community members, design the content of the community around their interests, and invite them to participate. Other people may be able to read material on your community web site but only registered members should be able to interact with other members.
- Make your community only as large as necessary to achieve your business goals. Research indicates that smaller, tightly focused communities produce more active, engaged and loyal participants. Why try to become a Facebook when there are only a few hundred or thousand people that you really need to reach?
- Leverage existing resources. Identify and incentivize internal “evangelists” to interact honestly and openly in community discussions. Re-purpose appropriate internal content. Build a customized network of external bloggers. You don’t have to start from scratch.
- Keep it real. Online social communities depend for success on trust and transparency. No overt selling. No obvious agenda. No talking when you should be listening. No promises you can’t keep. Nothing kills an social community faster than members who feel they’re being hustled.
As I mentioned, our new business is called SMTodaymedia. Drop by our modest web site. If you’re interested in talking to us or getting more information, contact Robin.
by Jerry Bowles
June 4, 2007 at 3:11 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Social Computing, innovator interviews
Jigsaw is a fast-growing, controversial online marketplace that lets people trade their business contacts for more contacts or cash. Co-founded by veteran sales executive Jim Fowler, Jigsaw aims to become the world’s largest Rolodex. Before Jigsaw, Fowler spent more 12 years selling marketing and collaboration software.
1. What is Jigsaw? Give us the elevator speech.
Jigsaw is the world’s largest online directory of business cards and company information. The directory has over five million business cards and is built and maintained by over two hundred thousand members. Jigsaw helps salespeople, recruiters, marketers, job seekers, and anyone else who wants to reach the right person(s) at a particular company do so without having to call and crawl all over that organization.
2. How does it differ from other business networking sites like Linked In or Open BC?
Jigsaw doesn’t compete with LinkedIn or OpenBC. In fact, they are complimentary. LinkedIn and OpenBC are for networking. They allow business people to maintain and grow their business networks or find links between themselves and other business people. Jigsaw is a data company that uses a wiki (community) to build and maintain the database. Jigsaw competes directly with data dinosaurs such as Hoovers and InfoUSA, who build and maintain their own databases rather than empower a community to do so.
The Jigsaw directory focuses on business cards, all complete with email and phone number (in addition to name, title, address and company). In exchange for adding or updating contacts Jigsaw members earn points that are used to purchase other contact information from the database. This model of rewarding users for participation encourages members to continually grow and clean the database.
3. Sounds a little anti-social, more like plain old you show me yours and I’ll show you mine. Does it work?
We have over two hundred thousand members and the database is growing by twelve thousand new business cards every day. Members don’t trade with each other; they trade with the system. Members can add business cards that have no value to them in exchange for business cards that have extreme value. The great thing about self-organization is that one person’s trash is another’s treasure. The system is also self-correcting. If a member adds a bad contact they will get a point penalty when another member updates it with the correct status or information. The updater gets points and the person who added the bad contact gets a spanking.
This basic reward structure has worked remarkably well and created a database unlike any other in existence, and venture capitalists agree; we’ve raised $18M to date.
4. What’s your revenue model and when do you expect to be profitable?
Our basic offering is a “Pay or Play” model. Members may either pay $25 per month for 25 contacts, or play by adding 25 new contacts every month. Think of it as paying with money OR data. The cost, compared to other data offerings, is extremely low.
In addition to individual businesspersons, Jigsaw also has over four hundred corporate accounts that purchase subscriptions and data in bulk. Finally, we make a great deal of revenue cleaning CRM databases. Because every contact in the Jigsaw database is complete, our ability to identify dead records allows us to offer one-ofakind cleaning and append services. We will be profitable by the end of this year (2007).
5. Most people agree that with so many social networking sites out there, there is bound to be a shakeout. Tell me why you expect Jigsaw to be a survivor.
As mentioned previously, Jigsaw is not a social network. Unlike the social networks, we own the database created by the membership, and can sell this data in a very traditional way, without the traditional overhead of having to build and maintain the database ourselves. In essence, Jigsaw is doing to the data dinosaurs what Wikipedia is doing to Encyclopedia Brittanica. We have many other sources of revenue we haven’t even rolled out yet, such as advertising and affiliate programs. Our focus isn’t on survival, it is on how badly we can disrupt the data dinosaurs.
by Jerry Bowles
May 21, 2007 at 10:14 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Social Computing, Web 2.0
With so many blog, wiki, and social networking applications–some authorized and some not–finding their way into enterprises these days, CIOs are under increasing pressure to bring these social computing “rat nests” under some kind of formal IT control by integrating them into the enterprise system. For Jive Software, the most influential software company you may never have heard of, this is the sound of opportunity knocking…again.
Launched in New York in 2001 by a couple of University of Iowa Java wizards named Matt Tucker and Bill Lynch–soon joined by CEO David Hersh–Jive quickly became the group discussion application of choice for large online communities at Sun, Amazon, Apple and many other sites with millions of users.
Tucker and Lynch had realized early on that none of the free PHP forum software had enough cache capacity to handle that kind of traffic so they created their initial application, Jive Forums, as an open source, enterprise solution, using 100% Java, tweaked for maximum caching. That proved to be a key differentiator. Today, Jive Forums powers many of the largest online communities throughout the world, including the SAP Developer Network (SDN) and ships as a standard part of SAP NetWeaver.
In 2004, after their significant others had finished up with grad school in New York, Tucker, Lynch and Hersh packed up the company and moved to Portland, Oregon where labor and overhead was a lot cheaper. The move cost the company a little momentum, but you’d hardly know it–it has been growing like gangbusters ever since. Jive Software ranked 443 on Inc. magazine’s list of 500 fastest growing private companies last year. Jive now has 50 employees, 1,600 customers, and expects to do about $15 million in revenues this year, according to Hersh. And all this without a penny of outside investment.
And things could get even better as the call for order in the collaboration space increases. Jive’s response to the growing enterprise demand to bring all their social software into a unified system is a new collaboration platform called Clearspace, (released in February and already in Version 1.1) that unifies all content tools (whether or not they were made by Jive) using an open, plug-in architecture, that emphasizes real-time communication. For users, Clearspace presents a unified portal-view to content from all over an enterprise. Relationship mapping directs users to content that has changed by topic, not by application. Rather than going through a lot of blogs or wikis to find out if anyone has been discussing something they’re interested in, they can look at a category and see if anyone has written a post, IM, or document on the subject. They don’t even need to know where to look, since communities are defined by categories, not types of applications.
Beyond providing a unified view of the content being created anywhere in the enterprise, Clearspace also contains its own impressive tool kit that allows collaborative document creation in the form of wiki-style pages; activity management; blogs; document management; threaded discussions; and content syndication. Users can also create dynamically configured workspaces, which can be restricted or open for use with partners and customers.
For enterprises that have already invested in other legacy solutions that are working well, Clearspace’s open architecture allows them to hang on to applications that people are already comfortable using. And just last week (May 14), Jive released Clearspace X, an application that allows companies to build communities with customers and partners by pushing out content they want to share.
“Our goal is to bridge the gap between the big, expensive and complex collaboration systems like Sharepoint and the sort of enterprise IT chaos and inefficiency that results from having a bunch of unconnected point-solutions,” Hersh says. “You don’t have to go the Microsoft or Lotus route to achieve the benefits of collaboration. You just need a secure, reliable way to tie all the pieces together and to expose the content and connections to users who need it. Clearspace does exactly that.”
Jive appears to be following the same “bridge the gap” model with Openfire, its XMPP-based (Jabber) communication RTC server which now has more than a million users and is widely considered to be a less expensive, less complicated alternative to Microsoft’s Live Communication Server and Lotus Sametime. Formerly called Wildfire and developed as a cross-platform open source project, the new enterprise edition (introduced in March) adds voice capabilities to the popular IM platform. Users can now talk from one PC to another while sharing screens, participating in discussion threads, and sending instant messages
For all the impressive technology, Hersh says he thinks Jive’s most important asset may be the experience it has developed over the past six years in working with many large organizations and IT departments.
“We’ve been put through the wringer many times,” he says. “There are a lot of companies jumping into the collaboration software space right now but we’ve been out there for a long time now and we have the products and the experience to create real business value.”
by Jerry Bowles
April 26, 2007 at 11:02 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, SAP
A hot topic among social media bloggers these days is exactly which big companies “get” the value of connectedness, community and emergent technologies and which don’t. A subsidiary discussion to that is around which traditionally managed corporations are jumping on the bandwagon for PR reasons because they want to be seen as one of the cool kids and which ones are actually making fundamental changes to way they interact with their customers, partners and employees.
Having spent a lot of time talking with a number of SAP executives at SAPPHIRE in Atlanta earlier this week, I’m delighted to report that SAP is one of those forward-looking giants that get it. Big time. I’m not talking just about the fact that the company invited more than 20 of us lowly bloggers to sit in the big room with the regular press and analyst corps or that Mike Procenco and Stacy Fish put together a dynamite program of sessions with executives on topics that were of particular interest to us.
Or even that they provided access to any executives or customers we wanted to talk to and let us talk to them without hovering protectively in the background. All of those things were welcome and displayed a level of transparency and candor that just didn’t exist in any big corporation I know of five years ago.
The new SAP attitude is clearly rooted in the company’s discovery that communities and co-innovation are a superior approach to the ”assign an army of software developers to a task and see what they come up with” style of development. Opening up the process to partners and customers (and, indeed, anyone who wants to participate) provides the kind of give-and-take that leads to better products, satisfied buyers, reduced costs and happier employees.
The granddaddy of these communities–the SAP Developer Network (SDN)–has grown from 340,000 members in 2005 to more than 750,000 today. (SDN has its own “evangelist,” Craig Cmehil. The Business Process community (BPX) was launched in the third quarter of 2006 and already has more than 100,000 members. Both have proven to be invaluble resources and converted even the most skeptical oldtimers to the belief that there may be something to this Enterprise 2.0 business afterall.
Another hub of 2.0 activity at SAP is the Emerging Solutions unit, led by general manager Dennis Moore, which is working on things like creating widgets that make it much easier for authorized users to get to the data they need inside SAP systems and a joint project called Duet with Microsoft that will allow SAP users to seamlessly use Office tools to work with processes and data. The unit even has its own vp of “imagineering,” a bright young man named Denis Browne.
Emerging Solutions was also involved in building a kind of internal MySpace/LinkedIn social directory called Harmony where employees with similar interests and skills can find each other. I was sittin way down at the end of the table when Dennis Moore was explaining Harmony but I somehow got the impression that Harmony is, at least in part, an attempt to provide SAP’s best employees with an alternative to posting their resumes on LinkedIn or MySpace where they can easily be poached by other firms.
What most convinced me that SAP gets it, though, is the enthusiasm of the people I spoke to. You couldn’t help getting the feeling that SAP has become a fun place to work. Not the kind of thing you would expect from a aging–how should I put this…German…engineering-oriented–software company with a reputation, not entirely undeserved, for making complex and costly products mainly for big companies. The new SAP is rapidly becoming a classic case study in how Enterprise 2.0 technologies, combined with a collaborative, social mindset, can give a giant corporation a second wind.
by Jerry Bowles
April 20, 2007 at 8:53 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Rave 2.0, event announcements
Can I confess something. I have come to loath travel. Having knocked off Antarctica and Greenland and Iceland before I was 25 (courtesy the U.S. Navy) and spent a 20-year career in corporate communications traveling the world first and business class on other people’s money (back when first and business class actually meant something), I find airplane travel these days about as satisfying as careening down a Mexican mountainside on a 40-year old bus designed to hold 50 people with 162 fellow travelers and 57 live chickens.
You can imagine my delight, then, when Francois Gossieaux of Corante fame invited me to take part in Enterprise Rave 2.0, a 24 hour Enterprise 2.0 brainstorming session with fellow practitioners and guests on May 21-22 at the trendy Hudson Hotel in New York City. As fate would have it, I live across the street from the Hudson. If I turn my head slightly to the left and look out the window as I type this I can see it. That’s my kind of travel.
The program looks outstanding. Andrew McAfee will kick off the event on the evening of May 21 with a keynote address that frames the issues around E 2.0 and Euan Semple will kick off the next morning session with an “Introduction/Provocation.” (Euan is an outstanding provocateur and I mean that as a compliment.) Andy McAfee will instigate the afternoon. The rest of the schedule consists of facilitated breakout group discussions and reports and a final wrapup at the end of the day.
If you are a practitioner looking at deploying web 2.0 tools in your enterprise or actively struggling with pilot projects to try to do that, don’t miss this event. And if you are planning to go, use the link in the left sidebar (at Enterprise Web 2.0 if you’re seeing this somewhere else) to get a $250 discount. I’m looking forward to welcoming you to my neighborhood.
by Jerry Bowles
April 17, 2007 at 3:46 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Brian Oberkirch and I had an ugly dustup yesterday over his having used Social Media Today, a web site I facilitate that pulls together–with the permission of the individual bloggers–material from 40 or so of the best social media blogs, to illustrate a post he wrote called Should You Get a Say in How Your Posts Are Used?
Although the post didn’t say so explicitly I felt it left the impression that I was using Brian’s posts on SMT without his knowledge or permission, which is not true. Some of the early comments suggest that others had that impression, too. Like all of the other bloggers who participate, Brian was formally invited and some of his posts have been appearing there for several months with, at least, his tacit approval. (I say “tacit” because I can’t lay my hands right now on the original e-mail exchange.)
But, that’s all so yesterday and Brian and I have agreed to move on to some of the more substantive issues he raised in the post, beginning with the question he poses in his headline. My short answer is: “Of course you should have some say in how your posts are used.” No one should be able to simply re-post full posts of another author on another web site without the consent of the creator.
What is unclear is how much is too much since a certain amount of “syndication” is valuable. I’m not sure there is an enforceable rule at this stage of web development (except for celebrities and big media companies who can a afford a lot of lawyers) but there need to be clearer guidelines.
Aggregation is not inherently a dirty word. Everyone who starts a blog hopes, I suppose, that they are going to become a Michael Arrington or Om Malik. Most are not. Your chances of becoming an “A’ list blogger who can make a living from sponsors and ad revenues are roughly the same as winning the Mega Millions lottery.
Most bloggers realize (or soon learn) this and they blog for other reasons. They view themselves–not their blogs–as the brand and they use blogs to market themselves and their services or products. For these people (and I’m one of them), having your posts appear on multiple blogs means a bigger audience and is a positive thing. It is such a positive thing that Blogburst was able to build a successful business around aggregation and has only recently started to pay contributors something. Many of my posts appear not only on Enterprise Web 2.0 but also at WebProNews, the FastForward Blog, and Social Media Today.
Now, if you’re more interested in trying to crack the “A” list, as many “B” level bloggers (say, 500 to 10,000 in the Technorati rankings) are, then you want all the hits and comments to go to your own page. The emphasis is on turning yourself into a power broker or your blog into a media property or maybe just proving to blogger rivals that your dick is bigger. Nothing wrong with that but it’s a different game from that played by most of us blue collar slugs.
Brian raises a point about finding a site on SMT labeled ‘Brian Oberkirch’s site” that he didn’t know about. That’s my fault for not explaining properly to SMT participants how the software that runs the page works.
SMT is a de facto demo site for Blogtronix (no money involved, although they let us use the platform for free and host the site), whose extremely social software was orginally designed primarily for enterprise collaboration and community building. Although I’m not sure the nice folks at Blogtronix anticipated it at the beginning, it has emerged as one of the best and most useful publishing platforms because it makes life so easy for editors–all feeds are pulled into a centralized staging area where a single editor can review dozens of new posts in a few seconds and instantly approve the ones he or she wants to use and they immediately appear on the front page.
When a new “member” is added to the site and the system is set up to collect “autoposts” of the new member’s feed, the system automatically generates a user page called “Dah Dah’s site,” that pulls all of the individual’s posts, not just those approved for the front page. The individual’s page (or site) accomodates a photograph and a link to background information and expertise. This is just one of the social, community-building features of the software and I’m sure you can see how it would be useful, particularly in enterprise settings.
What the page really is at SMT, and what it really should be called is “Dah Dah’s page” or “Dah Dah’s SMT page,” not “site.” Alas, there is not currently a way to turn this feature off but I will ask my Bulgarian friends if they can re-label it for this context.
Jeremiah raised the issue of losing a comment from his site to SMT. This is not much of problem, at least in my view, because in order to even see the “comment” or “rate a post” buttons, viewers must be logged in. The only comments you’re going to get there are from other members of the group who have SMT user names and passwords. Casual viewers are not even aware that there is a comment function.
As for revenue-sharing, I believe sites that depend on aggregated content should split the revenue with bloggers, once (and if), they have something to split. SMT has no revenues. There is no paid advertising on the site. There are a couple of things on the page that look like ads under a Friends of the Family heading. That’s exactly what they are. Companies that have been friendly and supportive of the web site. No money has ever changed hands. Should we be fortunate to get the point where we attract a sponsor, there will be an equitable revenue sharing plan which contributors will help devise. At our current readership level, we might be able to generate $5 a month for each of the 40 or so bloggers.
Finally, Brian raised the point that there are “several other authors aggregated on the sidebar, some of whom I would never associate with.” I have no idea who he is referring to or what the issue may be but I don’t think that being on the same blogroll as someone whose opinions you disagree with constitutes an endorsement.
I have tried to avoid politics when selecting people to be part of SMT and simply base my choices on whether their writing is interesting and contributes something to the social media discussion that readers will find useful. I am a journalist by training and inclination and I believe deeply in a diversity of opinions.
A few SMT bloggers have complained about the not-very-anonymous “Amanda Chapel” being on the list. For the record, I didn’t invite “Amanda” to be part of the group, but he/she/it was the only person so far to figure out how to register themselves and create a subsidiary blog on the site without being invited (a glitch that will be corrected in the next version of Blogtronix when it comes out in a few days). I could block “Amanda” but the three or four posts “she” has left there have been extremely civilized and well-written. On the other hand, I have not given Amanda access to the e-mail back channel where the family secrets are kept.
I don’t know who else Brian might have a problem with or why but I don’t believe you can manage a good and fair publication if you allow every contributor to black list all the people they don’t like.
I hope this clears the air a little. Let’s keep the conversation going.
by Jerry Bowles
March 20, 2007 at 11:24 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Kicking Vista at this point may fall into the dead horse category because so many users have already vented their frustrations that there isn’t much left to say. But, fellow Social Media Collective member Zoli Erdos has been having a lot of fun trashing Microsoft lately and my first encounter with Vista is still fresh enough to get my blood boiling so hear me out.
When my old computer died a few weeks ago I ordered myself a new Dell which came with Vista already loaded. I know from personal experience that installing a new Microsoft OS over an old one never works out well and it’s always better to start fresh.
My first disappointment was discovering that my new Vista computer was no faster than my old one running XP–despite having 2 gigs of RAM. Vista is a ruthless RAM-sucker. That’s not my least favorite thing, though.
My least favorite thing surfaced when I attached my Maxtor backup drive and tried to move some old files over to the new hard drive. I clicked on a folder and a message popped up to inform me that I didn’t have permission to open the folder. I tried another one. Same thing.
Now, my wife checks e-mail occasionally on my computer but other than that nobody else ever uses it. All of the files and programs on it are mine. I put them there. Ditto, the Maxtor. So, I think, why can’t I get access to my own files?
After about an hour of fumbling around, I discovered that through a laborious manual process I could claim “ownership” of the files, set permission levels, and open the folder. Sure, I thought, there must be a single button somewhere that I can push to tell Vista that all of these files are mine. Not even those CIA guys at Guantanamo would make a hardened terrorist go through this process for every single one of the 400 or so folders on the drive. I was wrong. Bill Gates planned to make me do exactly that. Bottom line: I’ve had my new computer for six weeks now and there are still files on the Maxtor that I haven’t transferred because I just can’t go through the bullshit. I also have an access problem with an update client that
