I haven’t spoken to TauMed in a while, but I’ve been tracking their progress over the last year or so. Last month I got an email from CEO Tauseef Bashir telling me that MediaNews Group, the nation’s fourth largest newspaper company, has finalized a partnership with TauMed to launch a multimedia health vertical for all its newspapers and regional portals. According TauMed, its content and social media services will be integrated into all of MediaNews Group’s Web sites.
This is a smart move by MediaNews Group, if for nothing else than realizing that the 1.0 stickiness so enviable at one time has now taken the form of socially-driven content, which brings a whole new meaning to the term pageviews. I think future iterations of the (web 3.0,etc) will revolve around the quality of the content being produced and delivered — or niche content if you like. And the big media companies are realizing that their newspapers alone just ain’t gonna pay the bills. In today’s media landscape, MediaNews can’t be satisfied with simply reaching your doorstep with yesterday’s news printed on dead trees.
They have to know you’re a pregnant mother on the north side of Dallas that’s interested not only in oil prices but bio-degradable diapers. I’ve heard the term hyper-local used on occasion and I think that says it all. The more targeted content MediaNews (and others) can deliver, and the more it can empower its users to deliver, the longer they’ll stay relevant. TauMed is a step in that direction.
Enterprise 2.0 is here folks. If you’re here in Boston for the conference, you’re obviously already a big believer. And if you’re an oracle customer, you might already be well down the enterprise 2.0 path.
I caught up with Oracle VP and enterprise 2.0 evangelist Vince Casarez recently to get the scoop on how the world’s largest software company is ideally positioned to help customers transition to enterprise 2.0, a term describing the tools and processes companies are adopting to drive better collaboration among finicky knowledge workers. He says that while the enterprise 2.0 space is maturing rapidly, companies are figuring out that enterprise 1.0 fundamentals still apply.
“We think it makes more sense to inject best-of-breed Web 2.0 capabilities into your enterprise application environments,” said Casarez.
He says knowledge workers are more likely to adopt new ways of sharing information when they have a sense of familiarity or connectedness to existing applications or workflows. He’s got a point. An overused example of that comes from Oracle’s arch rival Microsoft. Think of all the applications that have lived and died by the Microsoft Outlook sword. Fact is, if you can thrive in the ecosystem of an existing enterprise application, you’ll get a chance to live, or be adopted, as the saying goes in software.
With Oracle’s line of business (LOB) applications so prevalent, does that mean all of its customers will adopt its software to join the e2.0 ranks? Of course not. There will always be customers that gravitate to the start-ups, hoping to get a few months of added capability tacked on to spur time-to-market and and potentially cut costs. After the best-of-breed sparkle fades however, most companies will come to the realization that enterprise 1.0 never really left us.
Things like IT governance, compliance pressures and vendor viability will rear their collective heads just as they always do. Couple that with the fact that CIOs are now realizing they can look to existing infrastructure to satisfy enterprise 2.0 requirements and you have a compelling business case to look to an Oracle.
“Large enterprises have invested millions of dollars in existing applications, not to mention the training that goes along with having to ensure large-scale adoption of that infrastructure,” added Casarez.
I also asked Casarez about the enterprise 2.0 activity within its channel of solution providers and integrators.
“We’re seeing some very sophisticated enterprise 2.0 use cases start to emerge from our channel partners.It’s clear our customers have moved past the experimental phases of enterprise 2.0,” he said.
If you’ve followed any of Oracles’ web 2.0 moves over the last year, you know that customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation are two areas ripe with current pilots and early implementations.On the CRM front, its move to create more social CRM capabilities has drawn some praise from industry observers and it (CRM) seems to a breeding ground for a lot of enterprise 2.0 pure plays.
Its dThree implementation has been a showcase for Oracle on the marketing services front. I spoke to dThree a while back and saw what the right web 2.0 “injection”, as Casarez says, can do to sometimes stale marketing platforms. dThree layered just the right amount of social computing features to its marketing platform, built from the ground up using things like Oracle WebCenter and Fusion middleware.
Who says the enterprise software guys are just enterprise 2.0 window dressing.
I spoke with Matthew Greeley, CEO of Brightidea.com, recently and came away impressed with its approach to delivering real value with Web 2.0 sizzle. It just released WebStorm 5.0, which uses social networking elements to capture information that companies can use to drive innovation.
You could think of it as a Facebook-like application with just the right amount of administrative flexibility to keep the IT guys happy.
A marquee client for BrightIdea.com is Cisco, which uses the platform to create custom portals that spark collaboration with customers, employees, or partners. According to Greeley, Cisco has seen impressive results using the platform, generating more than 700 ideas from almost 1,500 members in 100 countries. Try to do that with some Web-based surveys and polling widgets.
Greeley told me that many companies lack business focus when deploying a social computing strategy.
“Deploying generic social networks without a specific business objective is like putting up playgrounds at the office; it may be fun for a while, but don’t expect it to improve the bottom line,” said Greeley.
What I really like about Brightidea is how it has honed in on a particular business driver. By looking at how a company can manage innovation, Brightidea takes the best-of-breed approach instead of trying to be all things to all people. Greeley says once it perfects that piece, it can move on, driving deeper into the enterprise and affecting other more traditional areas of collaboration.
That focus should certainly give WebStorm 5.0 a leg up in the battles to provide social computing infrastructure to large corporations over the next few years.
Companies are finally realizing the more you can apply the fundamentals of Web 2.0 to specific business objectives, the better the chance at ROI.
There’s no question that Mashups are hot right now. In fact, it’s a market that Forrester’s Oliver Young says could be worth nearly $700 million by 2013. Vendors in every sector are rushing to deliver these so-called “situational applications” to sophisticated business users everywhere in the hopes of improving collaboration and spiking productivity.
A vendor I covered recently and one that’s in the in the middle of Mashup mania is MindTouch, makers of Deki Wiki, Web 2.0 middleware that’s part content management system (CMS) and part Mashup maker.
Part of my inclination to cover MindTouch’s recent announcement was the results I was able to achieve on my own using Deki Wiki. Pointing and clicking through a hosted instance of its Pro version was a breeze recently. I was able to build a pretty extensive site with multiple pages, widgets and several other web services extensions in less than 30 minutes. Once you navigate through your own instance, you quickly get the sense of what all the fuss is about.
Apparently its latest “Jay Cooke” v8.05 release was good enough to turn the heads of Mozilla, which selected MindTouch for the upcoming re-launch of its Developer Community. In a prepared statement, Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s Chief Evangelist, said the platform’s ease of use, architecture and feature set drove the decision after a lengthy evaluation.
One of the features MindTouch told InformationWeek about was what it touts as the first polyglot application on the Web.
That new capability is helping Mozilla host all languages as a single site, allowing Deki Wiki’s user interface to adapt to the particular requirements of each page. That’s big, especially if you’re like Mozilla, who previously had to managed 16 distinct multi-lingual sites before partnering up with MindTouch.
You can see a quick demo of its polyglot feature below:
Similar to last week’s story on Alfresco and its vision of mashups, MindTouch is sometimes hard to pin down. But that’s also the beauty of what both companies do so well: they give the power of the platform back to the users.
I read this PCWorld story and I couldn’t help but think how indicative it is of of the typical command and control mentality within enterprises. I know there’s a balance between fighting the external social network (SoNet) effect and creating a corporate one of your own. With all the technology horsepower and APIs gone wild, shouldn’t we be able to figure out how to create some harmony between the two? The quote from one of the Gap’s web engineers sums it up pretty well:
“Do you really want Facebook to manage it for you in the outside world, or do you want to do it yourself so you have control?”
Control. It’s a word I hear over and over: How will we maintain control of what’s being said by the community?
I’ve talked to more companies than I can count about social publishing, social media, and setting up communities. The enterprises that typically lead the charge tend to be the ones that want to sell software or services to setup the community. But like communities in the real world, who wants to pay for the roads that others will use? When we talk to the brands in the community cross hairs, well that’s when you see the cold sweat start to break out.
The big brands hire in teams of marketing folk from the best B-schools to manage their content. They pay the most expensive consultants to determine what color has which meaning for their brand; what word has which association in middle America vs. big cities; heck how does this kid think vs. that adult. It’s been done this way for years, decades, and now, that level of tight brand control is showing cracks.
For the last decade or more, people with passion for products are expressing their views over the web - the enterprise fear originates when the views aren’t all that rosy. With all of their collective experience, too many companies still have the fear of shelling out big bucks to develop a social publishing strategy. Do they really want to give the rest of the world a forum to say what they’re really thinking?
The bus has already left the station folks; the negative views are already finding their ways through other sites and locations. I try to encourage brands to embrace both the negative and positive discussions their consumers have, preaching that it’s important to learn from the negative and leverage the positive.
But for all of those brands who don’t want to build the roads that provide more interaction with their consumers: your consumers are taking other roads already available. Enable them to speak freely with and about you.
A while back I attended a PRWeek and Waggener Edstrom event at the posh Hotel Palomar here in Big D. The event was titled Campaigns in the 21st Century: Measuring Perceptions. Dan Gallagher delivered an interesting look at how they analyzed content being created on the web related to the Presidential candidates. The analysis was done back in Sept. 2007 and was accomplished using the Narrative Network, a toolset they created using some pretty nifty algorithms. You can download Dan’s presentation here. (if it doesn’t work. lemme know) And here’s the movie.
In short, it’s text mining and brand mapping that creates a visual map of how the media perceives a particular brand or topic. That’s pretty hot stuff these days with all the attention on social media measurement or brand monitoring. Smart companies and agencies are finally figuring out that social media measurement is just another layer in a well-integrated approach to digital marketing and public relations.
I’m still a little baffled when clients don’t want to budget for stuff like this. It really gives new meaning to the “intel” connotation.
This post wasn’t meant to be a soapbox for why you need a widget strategy. That’s been broadcast numerous times and there’s even events dedicated to all things widgety.
But before leaving the pulpit, I will reinforce that if you or your clients aren’t exploring the ways to distribute content via widgets, you’re missing out. Sharing and syndicating information via web snippets doesn’t seem particularly revolutionary at first, but dissect things a little more and you’ll find it encompasses some of the fundamental things that we talk about everyday on the web. Simple things like giving users control of content to larger notions like telling your client they need to act more like a media company. Yep, all embodied in widgets. So when I noticed a few slick renditions from Real Time Matrix (for Social Media Today) and CoBrandit (powered by SpringWidgets), I thought I’d pass along a friendly reminder why they’re important. Some are obvious, so bear with me.
Facilitates content distribution. (remember when you had to send content to webmasters and the IT bottleneck?)
Ensures brand integrity. It’s the easiest digital billboard you’ll ever create.
Highly portable and mobile-friendly. Great newsletter and email marketing add-ins.
Feeds users’ habits of consuming bite-size chunks of micro-content.
Zero maintenance as content is automatically updated via XML and RSS feeds.
Drives blog and RSS subscribers.
Social Network (SoNet) ready content that’s easy to integrate and publish to.
They’re a poor man’s enterprise mash-up.
You don’t need a “Dummy’s Guide to Widgets” to create them.
Bill Ives points to a recent Forrester report by Oliver Young that discusses what works when selling Enterprise 2.0 to the corporate set. It sparked some thought on the old Web 2.0 adage that goes something like..”if you can’t introduce your offering into the enterprise for less than $10 or $20 bucks a month..” I’m sure I slaughtered that so I apologize to its author. But you get the idea. Once you identify the digirati, empower them and work from there.
And it seems simple, but his recommendation about a highly tailored pitch is dead on. The deeper you dig while uncovering the needs of the business, the more diverse those requirements tend to be.
A well-crafted marketing plan will target each constituency and use its interests to drive value and revenues..
If you’re hunting for a new PR firm or just need a gut check to see if you’ve hired the right one, head over to Room 214 and read their brief on “Firing Your PR Firm.” (Hat tip to my fellow SMT blogger Sterling Hager)
James Clark of Room 214 astutely points out many of the the reasons why the PR industry is spinning from a Social Media hangover. The thing I liked the most was his description of the “Conversation Analyst”, a person he describes as part web technician and part media-type.
Must have mainstream media experience as a journalist or communications practitioner. Strong social and analytical capabilities. Has experience with and enthusiasm for blogging, podcasting, RSS feeds, tagging, wikis, e-mail publishing, web analytics, cross-campaign management, adserving, affiliate marketing and online news aggregators. Has maintained a personal or corporate blog for at least one year. Has managed pay-per-click search marketing campaigns across Google, Yahoo, Looksmart, and other services. Can read and understand web analytics and tell a client with confidence what market to speak to. Applicants please submit a brief resume with links to your current and past sites or blogs, as well as your del.icio.us bookmarks. HTML skills required.
So the real question is how many of you reading this thought to yourself, damn that’s me. If you’re a PR practitioner, probably not many.
I haven’t been a big mind mapper in the past, mostly because of the complexity of the applications. In Web 2.0 times, anything with a learning curve of more than a half hour and my login credentials grow stale. But MindMeister, an Ajax-based mapping tool, has converted me. At least in the short-term. I used it a while back to document some of the things I found myself doing over and over on certain projects and thought I’d just publish to the web. It’s by no means meant to be comprehensive, it’s more about open sourcing my social media workflow. And on a Web 2.0 app note, I really like the Twitter integration allowing you to be alerted of updates to the mind map via SMS. That’s smart.
In the words of 80’s band David & David: “Welcome to the boomtown, pick a habit we got plenty to go around.” Those habits are Web 2.0 addictions these days. And the boomtown, according to this InfoWorld story is Web 2.0.
The venture capital industry funded 167 Web 2.0-related deals in 2006 for a total of $844 million, mostly in Europe and the U.S., according to a March 21 report from the accounting firm Ernst & Young and Dow Jones VentureOne. That’s more than twice as much money and nearly twice as many deals as in 2005.
But back to what spawned my initial thought. It was the Clearswift survey that raises the paranoia visibility of social computing’s impact on corporate America. And I love the headline…
Growing popularity of Web 2.0 sites put corporate information at risk and drains productivity
They should’ve just put an 800 number right behind it with a link to the infomercial on where I can buy their product. Ok, I realize they’re pitching their content filtering products to mitigate privacy risks and data leaks but c’mon. Do they really believe you can lock down this stuff? For you IT’ers, yes I know you can
But let’s face it, there’s a lot of gray area here. Where do you draw the line between what’s personal and business-related? If I have business content (define that for starters) on my Google homepage and someone Twitters, Skypes or IM’s me, am I now in no man’s land?
Whether I’m on the office network or in the home office, social computing many times is seamless. I can easily go from one workspace to another, regardless of time, place, or device. In fact, most of my services and data are in the cloud anyway. The way I access and use them is part of the way I work..my personal IP. Perhaps I should fight my employer for the rights to my intellectual capital?
More importantly, is anyone thinking about how all the things we web tinkerers bring to an organization? We are experimenters, we are early-adopters. Sometimes we’re even bleeding-edge instead of leading edge. Shame on us. Isn’t it more a question of common sense? What you wouldn’t say around the water cooler probably applies in Johnny’s new Ning network.
Personally, I can tell you a lot of what I learned about social media and Web 2.0 was derived from late nights at home, skipping lunch at work, or yes, even on the job in full work mode. That’s reality folks. And you know what else? Some of the Web 2.0 stuff I did at work almost three years ago has been fully adopted by former employers. They just thought I was goofing off.
I noticed some of the buzz surrounding Ad Age’s Digital Marketing Conference this week and couldn’t help but think of Jerry Bowles’ recent post about the Social Media Content Audit. He makes the point that a lot of the stuff we need to establish a networked community is right under our nose.
Cadillac’s top ad exec agreed.
..some marketers might be surprised to see the communities that already exist online. Liz Vanzura, global director of advertising for Cadillac, found 300 Cadillac communities in Yahoo Groups and 1,500 YouTube videos tagged Cadillac when she went out to create MyCadillacStory.com. They were already there. We were just providing a unique forum where they could interact using video technology.
Could finding the starting point for social media strategy be as simple as combing through an annual report and a few press releases? You bet. When you’re evangelizing how the new web creates value, you better know your client’s business and be able to identify the folks most likely to champion the cause. Good job Jerry.
One of the best things about the FASTforward conference was seeing how customers have used FAST technology - how they’ve applied it to the real world. I sat down last Thursday with CEO Tauseef Bashir of TauMed, a virtual health community, and got a glimpse of how healthcare information is evolving. This time the evolution is being driven by social media and powerful search technologies.
(Photo | Tauseef Bashir and Jerry Bowles)
According to some recent stats from TauMed’s PR firm about 10 million Americans go online each day searching for answers to health questions. And to no one’s surprise Health searches are now just as popular as paying bills online, reading blogs, or using the web to find phone numbers and addresses.
With that kind of activity, you can see why there’s an information land grab going on. So Is there room for another WebMD? And how do you compete with the 800 lb. gorilla? Bashir says they’ll do it by improving the quality of information, how that information is delivered and expanding the site’s social networking capabilities. No small task by any stretch.
The beta site, launched in December, is impressive. It’s actually more impressive when you see it go head-to-head with WebMD. During his demo, he showed me some of why there’s so much buzz around search becoming the new interface. When we searched for “MS” (multiple sclerosis) in WebMD’s v1.0 site and asked to see the Web results, we saw things like Microsoft Corporation and other irrelevant items. Doing the same search in TauMed rendered much more precise results. The other things I liked were the “ask a question” and “HealthShare“ features. Tauseef’s product team uses rich Ajax interfaces to dynamically serve up content, giving the site a clean, interactive feel when searching for data or contributing content for HealthShares.
Tauseef,a former FAST employee, is passionate about the company’s prospects and knows they’ve got a fight in front of them. He says consumers have short attention spans for fruitless searches and irrelevant information and intends to capitalize on it. The data mining and contextual analysis is the key, he says, to serving up razor-sharp results and creating a memorable user experience. But search aside, I dug a little deeper on the social networking aspects of TauMed’s community. Apparently, they’ve built their own content management system (CMS) and blog-like capabilities. I couldn’t help but notice how their user profile pages mimic blog features, providing very simple and intuitive interfaces and easy onramps to adding user-generated content.
The other thing that popped up during the demo was advertisements, mostly from Google. I’m OK with that, but what surprised me was the irrelevancy of certain ads. In the midst of deep-diving for additional multiple sclerosis (MS) information, a political ad obtrusively took over half the side rail in TauMed’s 3 column-ish layout. Suffice to say, Tuaseef quickly pointed out their product team is in the midst of improving their ad-serving backend. He also added TauMed was an early AdMomentum customer, putting much of the platform under rigorous testing and customization.
But let’s face it, as Web 2.0 as TauMed 1.0 is, they still have a numbers problem. Not the financial kind, but traffic. Outside of mass media advertising, you’ve got a classic case of a company needing some good ol’ fashioned grassroots and word-of-mouth marketing. Perhaps they should also reach out to other social software providers supplying the resources to companies building intranets, niche communities, and other social-oriented portals. You could even include some of the office 2.0 candidates like ZoHo, CentralDesktop, and others. They too will become more and more dependent on customized content as user bases grow. I guess you could think of it as enabling TauMed to become the de facto health widget.
However it plays out, they’re an interesting company that has a new evangelist.
I’ve seen a lot more activity on LinkedIn lately. I think some of it has to do with the end-user spike that a new feature can bring, in this case LinkedIn Answers.
It also might have something to do with my personal widget marketing strategy. (Translation: I have my LinkedIn profileplastered published everywhere)
But more importantly, the thing I’ve noticed about LinkedIn is how well it works at painting a picture of what social software and social networking is all about.Once you invite a client to be your connection on LinkedIn, it’s amazing how fast they get it after you explain how they’ve quickly become part of a vibrant and interactive social network.
Whether you think it’s useful or not, you can’t ignore the ramifications of things like LinkedIn. There’s been a ton of lists on how you can use LinkedIn, but it always fascinates me how each client comes up with their own take on its usefulness. But that’s just the point. Get people thinking about how they use social software and let them create.
Oh, and if you think we should connect, let me know
Social Media Today is live. Stop what you’re doing, grab the RSS feed and thank me later. I’m ecstatic to be a part of such an impressive group. Man, I thought I was a prolific blogger
Marketing Sherpa has just released their “Marketing Wisdom†report for 2007. These are always packed with tips from marketers coast-to-coast and as you might expect, this year’s version includes a lot of social media discussion. From blogs and RSS to search engine optimization (SEO) and email marketing, you can see what the best and brightest have to say.
A quick search on “enterprise content” yielded an interesting result recently. My other blog, “The Enterprise Content Management Blog” is (at the time of writing this) now the number eleven (11) website that’s found out of more than 300 million results. And who’s ahead of me? Wikipedia and some of the largest enterprise software companies on the planet. Priceless.
Ok, I’m flattered to be listed as an influential blogger at Social Media Today. But I had to laugh when the first thing you see after the list of names is a bunch of Google ads pitching criminal background checks. Ok, who’s the parolee in the group?
My premise for pitching the SMNR to them was simple. Let your audience slice and dice your content on their terms. Some folks will download the video, some will pull down a photo. Others might decide to just Digg it and move on. Whatever the interaction with your SMNR, the key is just that, interaction.
It’s fascinating to think how early we are in all of this. Fast forward a few years and think how silly it’ll seem gloating over an embedded video (below) inside of a press release.
View George Dearing's profile
I haven’t spoken to TauMed in a while, but I’ve been tracking their progress over the last year or so. Last month I got an email from CEO Tauseef Bashir telling me that MediaNews Group, the nation’s fourth largest newspaper company, has finalized a partnership with TauMed to launch a multimedia health vertical for all its newspapers and regional portals. According TauMed, its content and social media services will be integrated into all of MediaNews Group’s Web sites. 
Marketing Sherpa
