Here is a great article from today’s Boston Globe about how Comcast and Southwest Air are using Twitter – fascinating stuff. It also highlights Dell’s social media efforts, and the IdeaStorm concept for bringing their customers inside their organization to co-innovate (Customer Inside).

From Josh Bernoff, Forrester Research analyst and co-author of Groundswell (a great read for anyone considering Social Media efforts in business):

“We’re in a world where one person, by their actions, can make a company look bad, and it can get echoed and amplified over and over again,” said Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester Research and coauthor of “Groundswell,” a book about business and social technologies. “The power has shifted, [so] that big companies now have to be worried about one individual with a microphone called a blog.”

These are clearly emerging case studies of how enterprises are making use of Social Media, but are certainly harbingers of great things to come. Many of the highlighted use cases are for customer engagement, which means the enterprises are recognizing the growing voice and power of their customer base due to the Web 2.0 technology revolution.

If you look at how Southwest is using Twitter and Social Media in general, you can begin to see the emergence of new business processes that are different than those developed in the Business Process Re-engineering initiative … or dare I say it, Next Generation? These are agile and collaborative business processes, which will be required of all companies aspiring to be Next Generation Enterprises.

At Southwest Airlines, the social media team includes a chief Twitter officer who tracks Twitter comments and monitors a Facebook group, an online representative who fact checks and interacts with bloggers, and another who takes charge of the company’s presence on sites such as YouTube, Flickr, and LinkedIn. So if someone posts a complaint in cyberspace, the company can respond in a personal way.

It’s also interesting to see how enterprises are sparked into action. A couple – Comcast (b/c of Comcast Must Die and other YouTube campaigns) and Dell (b/c of Dell Hell) – were kicked in due to strongly negative publicity. Others like Southwest Airlines seem to have taken a proactive approach to provide an engagement channel for their customers. Even those that were kicked in, like Comcast and Dell, deserve strong kudos for their social media engagement efforts … it would have been easy to dismiss these efforts as only point cases amongst tens of millions of customers, completely edge. However, these companies took proactive action, and should be long-term beneficiaries of this effort.

Reacting to customer complaints is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to delivering a Next Generation Customer experience, and embracing customers to co-innovate new products and services, which is exactly what social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and others can enable companies to do.

I’ve also found other companies using Twitter in a proactive manner … including JetBlue and Whole Foods.

The future is bright!

Just happened upon a pretty cool new web service called Get Satisfaction. It is a community site self proclaimed as “People powered customer service for just about everything”.

I found the service doing a search on private video chatting for Seesmic.

It is incredibly easy to use, and addresses a number of customer experience and support needs:

• I can pose a problem to the community and get feedback and answers
• Users can vote on my problem / question and opt-in as having it too – allows the biggest issues to bubble to the top
• Customer self-support is naturally enabled
• Employees of companies represented within Get Satisfaction can identify themselves and participate in the discussion around their products and services
• I can add companies and products/services to my dashboard to monitor – I may be a customer or just interested in buying

Seems like a great site for getting customer support and service, and for referrals and pre-purchasing research.

The UI was very easy and intuitive … the process is easy … see the “how to” below … very interesting!

Across the blogosphere, the topic of “Enterprise Social Software” was hot this past week.

• Fred Wilson asks if the term itself is an oxymoron.
• Sam Lawrence makes a case here on how social software vendors, including his own Jive Software, and SocialText, Atlassian among others, could upend the incumbent enterprise vendors SAP and Oracle, while referencing this article about a recent Forrester report about these emerging collaboration vendors.
• Dennis Howlett debates Sam and makes a case here for why the incumbents will not be upended, and partially bases his argument on this viewpoint on enterprise inertia from Sig Rinde.
• Jeff Dachis of Razorfish fame raises $50mm from Austin Ventures to pursue the social networking application space within the enterprise
• Last, but not least, Oliver Marks provided a good synthesis of this set of conversations.

The buzz is great news for those of us betting on collaboration and social networking as fundamental disruptors to the traditional enterprise landscape and as fundamental enablers for the next generation of value creation from enterprises of all kinds (corporate, governmental, non-profits, and others). It means something is happening, and it surely is.

However, I feel the debate about this “Enterprise Social Software” market is being viewed through the wrong lens. It is a great set of reading, but it seems that most of the conversation can be summarized with the phrase “Where’s the beef?”. This is consistent with ongoing discussion around Enterprise 2.0 continues to swirl around the topic of the lack of repeatable case examples of ROI for wiki, blog, forum and social network applications.

The perspective that I believe is missing from all of these conversations is that the next generation of enterprise applications – Enterprise Social Applications – are not strictly about wikis, blogs, forums, etc. The emerging Enterprise Social Applications market, as discussed in the conversations listed above, should be about how those Web 2.0 capabilities (blogging, wikis, forums, social networks) are applied to applications to solve the business problems of next generation enterprises.

The problems to be solved by and emerging demand for these new applications arise from three underlying multi-decade mega trends hitting large enterprises today – Globalization, the Talent Crunch and Web 2.0. The push toward being global and acting global will force enterprises to have much more agile, open and collaborative business processes, and the applications to support those processes. The same thing is true with the talent crunch which is upon us – as boomers “retire” and the Net Generation enters the workforce, the demands for more agile, open and collaborative work processes and applications will grow dramatically. This is how the Net Generation gets work done. The fact that Web 2.0 is upon us and that wikis, blogs, forums, social networks exist enables all of this – however, these capabilities are not the specific applications which will be the next generation of enterprise applications, or Enterprise Social Applications as coined in the conversations this past week.

Much of the conversation focused on whether the legacy vendors, SAP, IBM, Oracle, will be dethroned by the emerging social software vendors of wikis, blogs, forums and social networks. I don’t think the real debate is about whether the incumbents will be dethroned or not. This movement is not about dethroning the incumbents. They will be embraced, and the true next generation of Social Enterprise Applications will leverage these legacy applications, primarily as data services for the new apps. If we focus on the definition today of Enterprise Social Applications, i.e. wikis, blogs, forums and social networks, then there is a debate as to whether the legacy vendors will replace them or be replaced. In this regard, I tend to agree with Dennis Howlett, that the legacy vendors will lay the tracks of collaborative infrastructure slowly buy surely across their massive customer bases. We’re seeing this happen (with strong anecdotal evidence) already with Sharepoint and Microsoft in the large enterprises, and I would expect to see Oracle/BEA, and IBM/Lotus to be there too. From the perspective of truly different agile and collaborative next generation Enterprise Applications, this is fine either way – the important part is that the collaborative foundations are established and accessible with webservices, and not so much about who is providing it.

The emerging need large enterprises have is to harness and operationalize these collaborative capabilities and Web 2.0 norms into true next generation applications to enable them to remain highly competitive in the coming decades solving problems around global execution, the talent crunch, collaborative customer experience, and collaborative leadership and planning.

So, if wikis, blogs, forums, and social networks are not the next generation of social enterprise applications, what will those applications be? That is exactly what we are working on today with hundreds of our Global 2000 customers at nGenera. Here is an example of a problem statement that we typically see today, with a focus on the Pharmaceutical industry. In Pharma, filling the drug development pipeline is more challenging than ever and the industry is not immune from the talent crunch or the demands of the Net Generation. While a large percentage of the workforce is considering or entering retirement, the demand for new drug development is higher than ever and the challenge for finding new breakthrough opportunities is as tough as it has been. A pharma company can ignore these issues and continue to solely rely on a shrinking in-house staff of thousands or researchers to innovate in this challenging environment and see its global competitiveness erode, or it can take a new, collaborative approach to drug development and talent sourcing. While sticking a wiki in the R&D department certainly will help, it will not be a breakthrough, and to Sig Rinde’s point above, without some level of process and ownership, it will not survive in the enterprise environment or be operationalized more widely in the enterprise.

What the pharma companies need are a true set of On Demand applications for Innovation that can manage agile and collaborative processes of talent sourcing by project – reaching out to millions of scientists and researchers across the globe in marketplaces scattered across the web – to facilitate an R&D process across the ultimate collaborative team of inside and external professionals (some of whom will be “retired” former employees) who aggregated to execute against project goals, and all of this done across many initiatives across the enterprise. Integrations with back office applications will be required. Mashing up web marketplaces where this external talent aggregates is necessary. A process for onboarding the candidates must exist (find, qualify/credential, accept) as must a process for compensating and providing proper incentives. The relatively small, tight internal R&D core drives the innovation and process through the applications, and the worldwide body of available qualified researchers and scientists engage in the process on a project by project basis either directly or through aggregation points mashed-up in the pharma company’s Innovation application.

I believe applications such as this, and the required leadership development, research, education, and process development offerings to support these new collaborative applications, are the future of enterprise applications for companies which seek to be competitive worldwide in the coming decades while navigating the globalization, talent crunch and Web 2.0 waters. Current collaborative applications such as wikis, blogs, and social networks provide us a glimpse into the possibilities, and will likely be an enabler, but alone are not the applications or the answer.

These blog posts further highlight now Twitter has become a natural outlet for customer feedback as well as a relevant touchpoint.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_get_customer_service_via_twitter.php

http://tinyurl.com/5fztb2

http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/2007/12/does-jamba-know.html

Below are companies which have set up Twitter Channels.

Southwest Airlines

Comcast

Dell

I noticed recently that Comcast set up a Twitter channel for soliciting customer input directly from the social web. JetBlue is another. I’m not sure if this type of Twitter support will scale as-is, but I’m sure a service could arise to enable it to scale in the same way as services and software exist for supporting customers via email & chat.

What is more interesting than these companies setting up channels on Twitter, is the potential use of Twitter for companies to (a) deliver a superior customer experience and (b) engage with customers to facilitate customer-driven innovation of their products & services.

With the growing volume of Twitter users, companies now have a direct channel to solicit, facilitate, and monitor feedback from a growing number of their customers. The topics can be rich, including:

• feedback on positive or negative aspects of a company’s offerings by monitoring Twitter as users tweet among their Friends and Followers (use the Twitter “Track” feature)
• customer support requests if a company is maintaining a Twitter account
• new offering ideas or offering enhancement ideas from monitoring or direct tweets to the corporate Twitter account (would suggest both for enabling true customer-driven innovation)
• referrals – many happen between Twitter Friends & Followers already, but active company involvement can both facilitate and amplify referrals which lead to sales

These are just some ideas, however, Twitter appears to me to be one of the richest and most opportunity rich areas for companies to truly engage with their customers to drive loyalty, sales, and new innovation. The big outstanding question is how much penetration in society will a service like Twitter get? How many people are eager to tell a group of people, some of which are truly “weak ties“, what they are doing?

I think the use of Twitter will indeed grow beyond its initial intention of ‘what are you doing?’. First, it already is. Second, if people know that they can be one mouse click or SMS message away from telling the company that just ticked them off what they think, I think adoption will grow. When my second Kenmore washer crashed recently within 20 days of getting it, I know I would have loved a better channel than the hours of phone time spent. In fact, I did Twitter the experience to my friends (i.e. became an active detractor). Third, if a customer can truly provide input that is valued and used by companies for new offering ideas, I think the service would also drive adoption. Don’t you have a lot of ideas for products and services that you use daily, but feel that no viable channel for providing your ideas to each company exists? I know I do.

I have always felt that the growth in Social Media services would lead to better overall customer experiences, and force marketers and companies to be more responsive to customer demands and more open to co-innovating with customers. I think Twitter presents one of the best Social Media services to help realize this outcome. I’ll be watching Comcast, JetBlue, and others as they embark in the Twitter universe.

UPDATE: Noticed that Sarah Perez wrote a nice post on ReadWriteWeb on this topic recently.

As a supporting follow-up to my previous post on Social Media Marketing in which I attempted to make the case for referrals as the key driver of marketing results on that platform, I want to highlight part of a post I read today from Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research (Josh’s Blog).

Josh’s post is about Social Media being a recession-proof platform for marketing spend. However, in that post I thought he also supported the case I was making about the innate value of the Social Media platform for the purposes of marketing – not awareness, not lead generation in the Pay-Per-Click manner, but what Josh calls consideration. Per his description below, what is called consideration is really about referrals … and the fact that marketers can create Social Media applications which foster valuable referrals (note the emphasis).

But social applications are about consideration, not awareness. Blogs, word of mouth, social networks… they’re about people connecting with other people. You may resist advertising if your finances are tight, but if your bud tells you that new movie is really worth seeing or that the Gap has the cutest new tops, that’s more persuasive than advertising. Basically, in a recession, the consideration phase is more important than awareness — and that’s where advertising flops and social applications succeed.

For fellow Twitter users, you can follow Josh on Twitter here.

^ brian

Technorati Tags: referrals, social graph, social media

In preparing for the SXSW Social Media Marketing Metrics panel at 5pm on Saturday, March 8th, I’ve been giving further thought to the use of Social Media for marketing purposes. Many companies continue to struggle with how to best leverage Social Media. This struggle goes beyond marketing, but right now my focus is on what value exists in Social Media for marketers, and how to best make use of the social media platform to deliver value.

My thoughts started by looking at other media and how marketers best leveraged the platform for value:

• Snail Mail – direct mail marketing became the marketing tool, and the purpose was solely dedicated to lead generation and the infamous 2% response rate heuristic
• Television – commercials became the marketing tool, and the purpose was to drive awareness and change behavior, starting with P&G and Soap Operas
• Web Search – contextual pay per click ads became the marketing tool, and the purpose was lead generation, or actually more appropriately actions (i.e. click to landing page to action/purchase)

TV is a very rich media environment well suited toward making brand impressions through slogans and jingles, and the medium provids no way to create a direct response. Web Search is a more recent phenomenon worth exploring further in the context of how to best leverage the Social Media platform. I’ll use Google to represent the Web Search platform and overall set of PPC marketing tools.

Google provides a highly valuable service to users – Web Search – which is to easily and quickly get access to relevant content anywhere on the web through search. The Web Search service design drove massive adoption, and the users were highly satisfied with the experience – hence a platform was born. Google needed to monitize this platform and marketers are always in search of new and better ways to access customers. PPC advertising turned out to be the ideal tag-along service for marketers on top of the Web Search platform. Web Searchers are by definition looking for something, for many reasons. By creating a platform where marketers could place contextual ads next to Web Searchers while they’re in the hunt for information was highly likely to grab their attention at a critical, highly contextual and compelling moment. The PPC model – click and then convert to action – makes sense, rather than trying to build a brand or a relationship, which would be entirely out of context for the Web Search platofrm. The model has proven itself out very well.

The point I am hoping to make is that the marketing tool created by Google and other PPC providers, was focused on the core characteristics and advantages of the Web Search platform – namely targeting users highly engaged in finding something specific at a discrete moment in time and providing those users a valuable engagement point. The users click an ad and buy or do not buy, and that is the end of the story.

Now, let’s apply the microscope to Social Media and the unique characteristics of that platform, and see if we can find an ideal marketing tool suited for Social Media. I’m seeking to take this debate past the value of merely creating conversation and two-way dialog with your customers, and toward a scalable marketing tool that is suited to the Social Media platform and delivers successfully on a key outcome sought by marketers that is also highly valuable to users.

If Web Searchers are going to Google to find information quickly, what are Social Media members seeking when they engage in their favorite Social Media site? I do not have a scientific survey to support any conclusions here, so I will highlight what I think based on my own use of Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning, Twitter, etc. For me, my Social Media activities are about making and growing connections with groups of like-minded people. Social Media has been a highly efficient platform for doing so, even though it has a ways to go to truly fulfill this mission.

It is important to note that groups is plural. My Social Network, or overall Social Graph, can be categorized into many groups of people, and many of my connections belong to several of my ‘groups’. The collection of these individuals and the various groups to which they belong represent my Social Graph. This is not to say that I have formally assigned people to groups, but in my mind they are allocated or tagged this way. At its core, Social Media to me is about persistent contextual connections with people.

What is a marketer to do with this core capability of Social Media? How can a Social Media platform owner monitize this core capability to continue to drive funding to grow the Social Media platform services for its users?

First, take the Hippocratic Oath. Doing harm to the core of the platform will kill the whole thing. If Google blew the search thing, the PPC model would quickly become irrelevant.

Second, ride the wave. Social Media is delivering value to users by facilitating useful connections across a user’s Social Graph. Whatever the marketer does and the Social Media platform enables, it must be done through the Social Graph and be seen as enhancing to one user’s connection to another.

To me, the most powerful intersection of Social Media and Marketing is around the concept of a Referral. For marketers, the Referral is one of the most valuable forms of lead generation around. It is also highly sensitive and built around trust. How to implement this Referral concept is beyond the scope of this post, and is maybe the subject of a business plan and a valuable business in the Social Media arena. Let’s just say it is way more complicated to implement than to just allow users to become “fans” of products / services / companies, such as what Facebook has recently done. The Referral model in Social Media is also not a platform for merely allowing legions of people to become sales reps for products, such as an Amway model.

I’m highly interested in conversation around this topic. The purpose is to begin to flesh out the true underlying value and capability of Social Media platforms, and how that capability can be leveraged effectively for marketing in a manner consistent with supporting the basic value of the Social Media platform (which is not to make members targets of marketers).

^ brian

Technorati Tags: facebook, google, myspace, opensocial, social graph, social media

I have the great pleasure, thanks to the initiative of Tom Parish, to be a panelist at the upcoming South By Southwest (SXSW) 2008 Interactive conference. The panel will be on Saturday, March 8th, and about Social Marketing Strategies and Metrics.

Here is a brief description of the panel. Tom also has a great write-up here.

Why are CMO’s so scared of social media and social networking? Let’s look at the success of vendors and businesses who have employed these new systems to explore their lessons learned and discover how to leverage social media maketing strategies that will leverage business growth for small, medium and enterprise-scale businesses.

We are looking for your ideas and feedback to make this a great panel. In fact, we would like to include your questions on the panel. Please comment on this post with any suggested questions for us to address.

Some examples include:

• what is social marketing and how is it different from traditional marketing?
• what defines success in social marketing?
• why is management so leery of incorporating social marketing strategies and how can that be changed?

We are hoping for attendees to have the following takeaways:

• what social media marketing strategies are working
• how to define metrics for social media marketing strategies and talk with your CMO
• why you should be thinking about social media and social networking-based marketing strategies for business growth

In particular, I’m hoping my BSG Alliance colleagues will chime in with suggested questions for this panel and case studies addressing the intended takeaways above.

I’m looking forward to your feedback and suggestions.

^ brian

Technorati Tags: enteprise2.0, socialmedia, sxsw

Manpower is doing some interesting and innovative things in the world of social media. This video from YouTube is a great example of Manpower extending its brand into the social media landscape. It also is a great representation of the future of work in Next Generation Enterprises. The video speaks for itself.

I also favorited some other short 15 second edgy social media ads from Manpower which are also interesting. You can find them here.

Andrew McAfee recently published two great posts helping guide companies through the choices of applications available in the Enterprise 2.0 landscape.

In his most recent post, How to Hit the Enterprise 2.0 Bullseye, he provides an interesting framework for how to match the e2.0 task with the tool, whether it is a wiki, social network, blog, or other. It appears to be a very good framework, though I’m still digesting some of the component/task matches and may come back with comments.

In that post, and this previous post titled, The Ties that Find, Andy hits on a very interesting point, pulling from the work of Mark Granovetter, titled “The Strength of Weak Ties” to articulate the value of Social Networking Software (SNS) to those executives that don’t quite see how all of these connections matter.

The notion, as McAfee puts it, that those people connected to you by “weak ties” bridge networks (of other potentially valuable folks for certain situations) better than those (fewer) people connected to you by “strong ties”, makes a compelling case for the value of SNS. Andy does a great job articulating this point, so I will not try to repeat it here.

It’s a common source of debate among those of us using SNS services such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. about how many connections to add. Many people are trying to limit the number of connections they have in these ecosystems. McAfee and Granovetter seem to suggest the more the merrier, and more productive.

At our BSG Alliance Senior Executive Summit, where Clay Christensen spoke to our member customers, the topic of thinking about your product in terms of the “job it does for its customer” came up, as you’d naturally expect. We discussed the Blackberry as a product that does the job of making knowledge workers productive during short snippets of down time (such as during a presentation!).

I find that Facebook and Twitter in part do the job of keeping me aware in short snippets of downtime each day as to what my extended network of mostly ‘weak ties’ are doing (both small things and major life/career shifts). The job these SNS services are doing for me in part is to keep me connected and informed of the whereabouts and whatabouts of a substantially larger number people than I have ever been able to remain connected to in the past. These snippets get burned into my brain and my searchable SNS services for recall in an On Demand manner when required. Yes, it’s also entertaining.

This is what is enabled by digitizing the social graph as the Facebook team would put it. I cannot imagine a company that would not want its employees to grow their ability to link their weak ties together. The value of this type of social graphing, while difficult to quantify, seems enormous.

Here is a link to an interesting article this week from CIO Insight, about social networking in the enterprise. It highlights Wachovia’s current initiative to deploy an enterprise-wide social network, and the rationale for doing so. Here is an excerpt:

Wachovia plans to introduce its social networking service to its 110,000 workers by early 2008. Like the popular Facebook service, the network will allow users to upload photos of themselves—not just corporate ID mug-shots, either—and personal information. Community-building across the vast company is one of the goals.

This initiative gets at the heart of an internal effort at BSG Alliance as well – that of the “Personal Tag Cloud”. Think of the PTC as a representation of a person’s skills, abilities, interests and past projects for starters. The big tags are where the interest or strength or experience is the greatest. A social network and collaborative focus, in addition to the right On Demand applications, allows this to happen. Some more excerpts related to the PTC concept and the benefits of this type of social networking:

The idea is that it will boost top and bottom lines by providing a clear understanding of who knows what, and who knows whom, within a company and among its business partners. Making it easy for people to get together online and off, and harnessing the energy and information unleashed in recent years by so-called Web 2.0 tools, is supposed to advance core business tasks including sales, marketing and knowledge management.

To my BSG colleagues, it’s interesting to note the industries which have focus on using collaborative social networks for getting work done:

Early adopters range from the U.S. intelligence community, which plans to launch a cross-agency social network in December, to major players in the pharmaceutical industry, where drug discovery is being driven by knowledge-sharing across companies

^ brian

In recent meetings with BSG Alliance customers, the topic of the next generation of workers consistently generated a high degree of interest – both from a perspective of how to recruit and retain this next generation as well as how to market to them.

In my last meeting, one of the participants asked an engaging question. To paraphrase and protect identities, the question was roughly as follows: “If I have a long standing, stable, and successful brand which has not changed much if at all in its lifetime, what if anything do I need to do going forward in the Next Generation Enterprise world?”

The question generated a good amount productive discussion, and an interesting comment from the group which I felt was not exactly correct, but did not have a good response at the time as to why it was not what I felt was the right response.

The comment was basically that reaching customers in the social media world is just going to be another channel that marketers will have to figure out, just like the shift from print to radio to TV, and so on.

I do not agree with this premise – social media is not just another channel. Flipping through the following powerpoint from Charlene Li at Forrester Research this morning helped to clarify my thoughts. It’s worth looking at Slides #16 through #30 then reading on.

Those that treat social media as just another channel, are doomed to fail in social media marketing, unless they learn and adapt along the way. Charlene goes into some of the reasons and examples in her presentation, mostly from a perspective of how social networks like Facebook and their members behave and operate.

I’d like to add an additional reason. A massive power shift is underway with customers and consumers, powered by Web 2.0 and Social Media. More information is in the hands of customers now than ever before, and customers can now collaborate in unprecedented ways as the costs of collaboration have trended to zero. As such, customers are demanding to be treated differently – not as a marketing channel, but as a person – and have response mechanisms at their disposal to ensure that marketers provide them with what they want. They want experiences. They will give feedback. If they’ve been wronged or are dissatisfied, they will rapidly form a group with shared interests and respond in force globally! If they have a great experience with your brand, they will do the same!

Social Media is not just another marketing channel. The challenge for marketers and brands is greater than figuring out how to take print and radio advertising to TV. The challenge is rethinking how advertising shifts from a one-way message to enabling positive and desired experiences, with Social Media as the enabling platform. Marketers must also understand the experience and outcome their customers desire, and be able to deliver it. Accountability for not doing so comes fast and hard. The spoils of doing so also have exponential returns.

As a reasonably active user of Facebook, the good news for marketers and the case example mentioned above is that I can tell you few companies or brands have figured this out yet, and the Social Networks themselves have not identified how to effectively enable this type of experience-creation for the marketers yet either.

I do expect an inevitable tipping point is near.

^ brian

So the iPhone is nearly on the market, and the reviews are in. Nearly every media outlet new and old, including CNBC, has been buzzing about it all week. One of the most common complaints is that the iPhone does not support corporate push email – no Exchange integration. For the business Blackberry addicted world, this is a non-starter and the common thesis goes it will significantly impact iPhone market penetration. We’ll forget about whether the keyboard will work or not for now (reviewers are saying it works well).

With this in the backdrop, I’ve been digging in deep on Facebook and applying it to my professional life. I see great potential in the platform and am already getting value from it, and also understand that challenges exist and will continue to emerge. Of course I’ve been following the blogosphere reviews on Facebook for business and came across this great synthesis by Dennis Howlett of AccMan and a member of the Enterprise Irregulars. Below is a quote from Dennis’ post that sparked my post:

Today, I see a combination of Twitter and Facebook as having the potential to replace 90% of the email I receive while improving my personal productivity. I’ve become enough of a Twitter junkie to make sure I receive updates while out and about–along with Facebook updates.

I’m not sure about the 90% number, or am I sure when it will happen. But, I have experienced the point made. The combination of Facebook with Facebook mobile (i.e. I get my inbox delivered to my phone via SMS) and Twitter (which is also delivered to my phone by SMS, and to which I was admittedly a relucatant adopter) is filling a rapidly growing percentage of my communication and collaboration needs in a way that email does not any more. I find that the message gets my attention quicker, and that the issue being discussed gets solved faster this way. Plus, whether on Twitter or Facebook, there is a record (public or private at my discretion) that I can refer back to at my convenience.

Here is a real scenario. I update My Trips in Facebook to let my friends know where I’ll be for the next two weeks. A BSG colleague notices that I’m traveling to the Bay Area and send me a Facebook message about meeting a potential business development opportunity out there. I get the message on my mobile phone, and we dialog and make the trip happen. It would be even better of the prospective opportunity is also a Facebook member and a friend of my colleague.

Another potential scenario once our Boston colleagues are on Facebook and Twitter! I send Twitters about what I am seeing at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. A BSG sales colleague in our Boston office sees that I’m in the city and at the conference, and arranges for me to come into a sales meeting on short notice the next day to discuss BSG’s outlook on Enterprise 2.0 and the impact for Next Generation Enterprises.

Notice that these scenarios do not require corporate email. In each case, the colleague may never have thought or known to reach out to me, even though some of that info may actually be in Exchange.

So, does Apple really know something we don’t about the future of corporate email? Is the iPhone a harbinger of business communication devices for the Net Generation? Would not have thunk it even a month ago, but it’s an interesting thought today and has some emerging use case support. Corporate email may never die, but it may not need to be as mobile as it is today or it may just get put back on the desktop.

^ brian

I read today in Techcrunch that LinkedIn is opening up its platform for application development to follow Facebook’s lead. To me it seems too little and too late … anecdotally I’ve seen a fast pickup shifting of people from LinkedIn to Facebook in my network. I’ve read about the same. LinkedIn is rapidly becoming known as a recruiting tool / job board network.

I’ll go out on a limb to say that LinkedIn needs to do something more interesting than follow Facebook’s moves nine months later.

^ brian

Listening to the Director of Research at Manning & Napier speak at the Enterprise 2.0 conference about his adoption of a SocialText wiki for his 40 person group. The firm manages $16 billion of client assets.

He started out by saying they had a management problem (i.e. a pain), and then went looking for solutions. This is a key and probably obvious insight … yet, with all of the talk about Ajax, Wikis, Blogs, mashups, Ruby On Rails, etc., the will to buy and the will to adopt/use new technology is born and fed from the need to solve pressing problems and it feels like the need to solve a pain is many times missed in the 2.0 talk.

The problems were as follows:

• Inability to efficiently capture and retrieve the knowledge of the Research Department (high turnover industry) – most info was in the email system and impossible to find.
• Promotion of communication between different sector groups and different age groups – breaking up silos and bridging the communication gaps.
• Potential for communications between different parts of the organization (e.g. Research & Marketing)
• Real-time documents, time and space shifted meetings

Biggest gripe of the Chairman was the lost knowledge when the research analysts walked out the door, which is the first bullet above. This was a very big problem for him – turnover is an industry wide issue that while constantly addressed, still happens. With the prospect of solving that pain, they adopted the wiki. From that initial adoption, they have begun to start solving the other communication problems that seemed to be less pressing … for example, the 71 year old chairman is the most read blogger in the company and now and puts out routine blog posts to the company.

It seems this knowledge capture and sharing is a classic benefit provided by a wiki, so the fit seems natural.

^ brian

Technorati Tags: e2.0, enterprise20

In immersing myself in enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0 technologies and platforms … Facebook, Twitter, Texting/SMS, Wikis, Blogging, RSS, etc., while also working with those that are addicted to the traditional email/phone way of collaborating, I’m continually finding myself bridging worlds. For some of my business dealings I’m watching email and the phone, while for others I’m connected in real-time through the Web 2.0 / e2.0 collaboration technologies mentioned above. I have to say it’s very interesting watching these two worlds do business with me in very different ways at the same time. It also taxes my mobile device (Treo 750) and laptop (MacBook Pro) significantly, though both seem up to the challenge.

^ brian

Technorati Tags: e2.0, enterprise20, social media, web20

From a social standpoint, and per the McAfee point of “obsessive platform” users highlighted in a previous post, another key parameter of the e2.0 social and collaboration paradigm seems to be emerging at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. This is highlighted in Stowe Boyd’s session on Social = Me First, and is the concept of the value of connections and how your connections (and I will personally add you reputation among this list and in general) are key to success in the socially networked world.

Some interesting quotes …

“the buddylist is the center of the universe”
Stowe further points out that “it’s mostly connections” and
“I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections”

^ brian

Technorati Tags: e2.0, enterprise20

As a person trying to shine the light in my own organization on Enterprise 2.0 style collaboration and trying to lead other organizations toward the benefits of social software on productivity and effectiveness, I’m constantly reminded of both how far along we have come as well as how far we have yet to go. Enterprise 2.0 is in many ways still an early adopter game, thought the adoption curve is steeper and faster than in previous technology shifts.

Below is an excerpt from a longer post written by Lee Bryant and featured here at Social Computing Magazine that illustrates some of the current pressing needs in Enterprise 2.0 social software development to pick up the next wave of adopters. These are the folks that are flexible and creative, and want to try new, potentially more productive applications. Yet, they are not the early adopters that will try anything. They are productive in what they do and use, and are looking for the next edge. The switching costs are just a little higher now.

Here is the excerpt and the link to the longer post:

At the opposite end of the stack, I think we need to think about consistent interface design to avoid the obvious problem of users (especially the all-important second wave adopters) having to get to grips with too many different interface patterns, metaphors and identities. It will not always be necessary or desirable to create a unified interface for a number of different tools, but I foresee this being a frequent request from both users and buyers. In this scenario, plugging in different applications, services and data sources between a consistent interface and a common data architecture becomes a whole lot easier. We have talked about creating a lightweight social interface onto corporate systems, but perhaps this might also extend to other social software tools and services as well, with feeds and APIs doing the integration leg-work to allow what users think of as ‘the system’ (i.e. the interface) to float gracefully above the water like a swan.

The goal here is to offer companies a fluid combination of tools, web services and bespoke systems to allow them to craft evolving solutions, rather than static systems that gradually fade into obsolescence. It is the ‘release early, release often’ principle of Web 2.0 applied to internal corporate systems.

I’m seeing this in practice as we get to the next wave of adoption. It’s clearly a problem that will be solved, yet it is also clear that nobody has provided the right solution yet in Enterprise 2.0 land. We are experimenting with everything now and are working on our own apps in this area too. Assuming the early adoption productivity is the tip of the iceberg in value creation (as it usually is – think Microsoft), then solving the problem for the next wave of adopters and the next after them is really interesting.

Here is the link to the post. Comments welcome.

^ brian

I had the pleasure of being invited by Hinchcliffe & Company to attend their Web 2.0 Executive Bootcamp as a guest VIP blogger. The session was a day-long interactive session all about Web 2.0 – including education on all of the aspects of Web 2.0, as well as examples of innovators and discussions about implications and applications for personal and business use.

The day was organized around Hinchcliffe’s Seven Principles of Web 2.0. I could, and probably will, write an entire blog post on my interpretation of each of these Principles. For now, I will focus on making this a synthesis of the event and highly recommend that anyone interested in Web 2.0 attend one of these bootcamps. If you find this post interesting and useful, the bootcamp should be worth your time … of course, the constant changing nature of Web 2.0 will ensure everything is fresh and new, so this is pre-reading.

I think the course can actually appeal to both those that are Web 2.0 neophytes as well as to those that are in the early adopter camp, which is where I’d put myself. The Seven Principles are a good organizing framework for Web 2.0, and each explodes out into a web of interesting implications and opportunities for enterprises looking to leverage Web 2.0. For heavy Web 2.0 adopters, there will be some very familiar territory covered (e.g. what is a wiki, blog, etc. and how to set up), however, the content was delivered in such a way that if you were already at a high level of understanding, the content allows you to think at the next level for each of the Seven Principles.

Below is a list of the Seven Principles and some of the salient points that I thought came out of our discussion on each:

1. Web as Platform

This one seems to speak for itself. The premise is that the Web is becoming the primary location for our applications and data. The difference this time is the network effects are far stronger than on the PC or Client/Server platform. With a global audience of over 1 Billion people using the Web, and the application of Reid’s Law – each new human node in the network increases the network’s value exponentially, this new platform is immensely more valuable for all users. We had a fairly deep discussion of the impact of these network effects and the opportunities. Case example – with services such as Amazon’s S3 in the cloud, what is the impact on M&A for new startups? If a startup can get reliable storage services for $0.15 or less per Gigabyte and the service scales, then the need to sell to a larger company to support its growth diminishes. Now extrapolate that to a series of viable services that scale, are reliable, and are cost-effective … the potential to innovate up the stack appears to grow massively.

2. Services beyond a single device

The core argument here is the combination of the sheer number of mobile devices and their ability to connect to the Web at high speeds. With over 2 Billion handsets about to be sold this year, and a growing number with robust web browsers and flash in the browser, the ability to leverage the web while mobile will increase substantially. Add on to that the use of SMS and RSS integrated with web services, and the mobile device is now intricately tied to the web. Outside the US in fact, the mobile phone is becoming (or may be) the preferred (or most frequently used) way to access the web. Services that appeal to younger web users seems to be leading the charge here … Facebook and its use of SMS is a prime example … Google also has great mobile services for Gmail and Reader. The Blogging Contribution Chain [hmm ... the notion of a "Contribution Chain" is interesting in the context of Web 2.0 services - this should be studied, though I'm sure it has been ... if not, I'd like credit for the term please!] was highlighted as an example in the bootcamp. Bloggers can post from multiple places, including Mobile phones. Also, with RSS, the blog posts can be read while mobile (mobile RSS reader or Google’s mobile Reader).

3. Data is the competitive advantage

This is the topic of data as the new “Intel inside”. As people come to a web service and participate, they are contributing data – intention data (clicks), personal data, new content, ratings, etc. Web services that are the first to aggregate interesting and useful data establish a clear leadership position and a high barrier to entry for competition. Witness Google and its search index capability due to page rank data, Amazon and product reviews, Craigslist and classifieds. We discussed opportunity areas where new companies can be formed around this notion of data as the competitive advantage.

4. Lightweight programming and business model

A core part of Web 2.0 is being agile, nimble, quick, and collaborative. This is all achieved with a lightweight programming and business model. Gone are the days of long software development lifecycle. Web 2.0 work is done with speed to market and speed to adoption in mind. This requires more agile methodologies, a perpetual beta product, shorter release cycles. It also involves a shift in design patterns. Hinchcliffe and Company highlights a number of Web 2.0 mantras, and at least one came out in this section, namely “Web 2.0 is not about push, it’s about pull.” A fundamental tenet of Web 2.0 from a design perspective is putting the person at the center of your service – they’re in charge. As such, we discussed the Architecture of Participation extensively, including how to create one and some components that are required in order to create one – being open in design and using the simplest standards to get the job done. The information in this area was quite rich

5. Rich user experiences

Staying on the topic of ‘rich’, we transitioned into the principle of creating rich user experiences and how to do that. This discussion included an overview of the main Rich Internet Application tools available today – Ajax, Flash/Flex, and now SilverLight from Microsoft. Despite my initial read on SilverLight, it actually sounds more powerful than I originally believed. We reviewed the basic positives and negatives of each, and the notion of the proprietary plug-ins required to run Flash and SilverLight applications vs. the openness of Ajax. Also discussed was the current complexity of Ajax due to the myriad toolsets available and thus lack of productivity. We closed with a good discussion on Widgets – the notion of being able to create functional chunks of application capability that can be distributed across the web and embedded in remote websites – examples include Google AdSense, and YouTube. In fact, it was interesting that a lot of YouTube’s early viral success was because it was easy to embed video clips in MySpace pages to share with that powerful social network. For a good look at widgetization of the web, check out WidgetBox.

6. Harnessing collective intelligence

Hinchcliffe states that this principle is tied tightly to the third principle, “Data is the competitive advantage”. We returned to a core principle of Web 2.0, namely that “it is about the people”. A paradigm shift is required to truly understand this and create a valuable Web 2.0 service – need to recognize that the people that come to use your service are “partners”, and their use and contributions make the service more valuable. These partners increase the value of the service through their contributions and their intention data that is contributed through their usage, not to mention their referrals and word of mouth that enable exponential growth. Services need to be sure to empower the users to improve the service. Some interesting and some now familiar examples were discussed (the Chevy Tahoe design your own ad campaign). An interesting one was XM Radio’s 20 on 20 campaign, which allowed users to design the programming for Channel 20. In a Digg-like rating fashion, users were responsible for the top 20 songs for Channel 20. Ratings for Channel 20 on XM rocketed up from the basement to being consistently among the Top 3 XM channels. We also discussed collective intelligence as a core enabler and component of social networks, blogs and Wikipedia.

7. Leveraging the Long Tail

I had to leave at this stage to catch a flight and get back to work on the Next Generation Enterprise revolution. Information on this Principle can be found on the Web from Dion Hinchcliffe’s writing, as well as their corporate site, and other bloggers who have written about Hinchcliffe’s work.

Overall, this bootcamp was a rich discussion of Web 2.0 and the core principles discussion was also followed by other items such as a discussion of Enterprise 2.0. Very thought provoking information, and a good framework for thinking about the complexity and overall opportunity of Web 2.0.

I’m now going to think a bit about this notion of a “Contribution Chain” as part of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 services. If people are at the core of Web 2.0 services, data is the core competitive advantage, and harnessing collective intelligence is key, then knowing how the Contribution Chain works is vital to Web 2.0 service design, growth and scalability. Though, Chain may be too rigid … may need to think about “Contribution Webs” or “Contribution Ecosystems” or “Contribution Networks”.

^ brian

Technorati Tags: e2.0, enterprise20, hinchcliffe, web20

I just spent a day with executives from two Fortune 500 companies (collectively over $50 Billion in revenue), which for now will remain nameless. Senior executives from both companies were in the room, including the CEO of one of the companies and direct reports to the CEO of both companies.

For those that doubt that enterprises are in the midst of a transformation to becoming Next Generation Enterprises, and that Web 2.0 technology and social change will be part of it, this meeting provides powerful anecdotal evidence that this shift is real and is underway today.

The topics of discussion in the room, and these were around active, real projects, included:

• Facebook
• MySpace
• SecondLife
• Using collaborative gaming concepts via the web to achieve business data and outcomes

Many in the room were actual members on Facebook, MySpace, SecondLife, among other social networking services.

Also contrary to popular opinion, these companies are not Silicon Valley based technology companies, rather they have been successfully in business for decades and decades. I was impressed with their thinking and how they’re thinking about using Web 2.0 technologies, and social and process change to begin to transform their businesses.

Real value exists in Web 2.0 in the Enterprise (yes, Enterprise 2.0 or e2.0 for short), and the shift is underway.

^ brian

I may be way behind the curve on this one, but I am now on Facebook, and am finding it fascinating on many levels. For those interested, my profile is here … feel free to invite me as a friend.

Here is a recent article passed on to me by a colleague.

Also, what is very interesting to me is that by starting with the college audience, Facebook was forced to solve the mobile problem. Facebook has what appears to be very good SMS usage … initially I was disturbed by the notion of having a separate Inbox in facebook. You can dialogue with your friends in Facebook thru its own messaging plaform. You can get email alerts, but all they do is provide a link back to the conversation. Not extremely useful if you’re not at your desk. With SMS, you get an instant message of your Facebook conversation and can respond directly from your mobile phone.

I am exploring the landscape of On Demand application platforms (Webex – communications, Salesforce – CRM, Facebook – social collaboration, etc.) now and hope to have a post on the topic to stir up some debate on the topic.

^ brian

The Wall Street Journal reported today that Nike is dumping (registration required) their main Ad firm Weiden + Kennedy to search for a firm with more digital savvy. This is a great article and further evidence of the shift in reaching customers digitally, and more importantly in a two way conversation.

Here are a couple of very interesting quotes from the article:

Industry executives say the move was a wake-up call to Madison Avenue. The message is clear: No matter how talented an agency’s creative team or how well the client’s management likes the firm’s executives, the agency is of limited value unless it embraces digital media.

It’s surprising to me that the need to embrace digital media is new news for those that serve advertisers. The issue is the problem is about more than just embracing digital … it’s about embracing a new marketing paradigm – marketing as conversation rather than the traditional marketing as one-way messaging.

“The thing is all these things look good on paper but so did communism,” says Matt Freeman, chief executive officer of Tribal DDB, the digital arm of Omnicom Group’s DDB Worldwide. “At the end of the day it’s all about who is in charge. … Traditional ad people are in favor of integration as long as they are in control. It still comes down to who reports to who and egos.”

Communism? I think the quote can be taken out of context, so I’m not going to go there. However the point on who holds the power in these agencies is poignant … a word to the ad agency industry (if they desire to keep their clients’ business in the shift to digital): read Clay Christenson’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma.

I’ll place a bet that the industry will miss this disruptive shift ….

^ brian

Leverage Social Media recently wrote a two-part article on Kalivo and our activities in enabling Marketing 2.0 in the enterprise. I thought I’d take a minute to toot Kalivo’s horn a little, as I had fun with these interviews.

Article – part one

Article – part two