I thought WPP chieftain Martin Sorrell covered all the bases as he described his firm’s motivation:
“Growth is being driven by continuous pressure on clients to raise their like-for-like revenue growth and to optimise their investment against a backdrop of changing demographics, decreasing product differentiation, intensifying global competition, the fragmentation of the media and the impact of digital development.”
The forces at work here are disruptive to say the least. The big agencies are getting pressure from clients to move away from costly print and TV ads and move to more conversational forms of marketing and advertising. It’s not enough to just deploy a microsite and track page views. Customers want real-time information and they’re demanding it on their terms.
If I were a mid-market or large brand, I’d cut down on the one-off microsites and email-based newsletters and move the conversation to more interactive environments. Many companies have figured out that tapping the collective wisdom of their customer base provides huge value. Evidence of this is the large number of customer-driven communities and B2B networks getting sponsorship deals from consumer brands and software companies. It’s likely these communities are where your customers are lurking anyway or they’re building their own versions. Why not engage with them on their terms and in their environments?
I’m not calling for the death of traditional marketing techniques - unless there’s no infusion of 21st Century smarts.
It was a hectic June and I’m finally starting to distill some of my conversations and briefings. I was in Boston a few weeks back for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference and while I definitely came back energized, the best part was the old-fashioned version of social networking — pressing the flesh as the saying goes.
I was there as media and while I would’ve liked to have blogged more about the show, I did manage to get some microblogging in courtesy of CoverItLive’s service. I realized early that I’d be attending a bunch of sessions with a crappy Wi-Fi connection in the backdrop, so I figured I’d cut my losses and get as much micro content in place as possible.
The widget below is the snapshot of my ad hoc meetings, session tracks, and a few hallway and bar conversations. Some of the latter were definitely the more interesting as I had several instances where I connected with folks I’d blogged with and collaborated with through Twitter and other channels.
I ran the CoveritLive widget on the Content Management Connection and ECM Blog after the show and noticed it had about 500 unique views over the course of a few days. How much of that had to do with the novelty of the service remains to be seen. Janet Lee Johnson thought it was cool enough to blog about it, and I noticed it had enough lift to light up Twitter with a few Tweets.
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.
Several months ago a content management vendor told me that the oncoming recession was causing it problems with revenue generation. I said perhaps, but it’s also possible its problems were related to the fact that its customers were really angry and really vocal. It’s too easy to blame market conditions without taking a hard look in the mirror sometimes.
For this top 5 list I won’t name any names, but I encourage everyone to try to clean their own closets occasionally. Maybe these items will add up to survival in either a recession or peak market conditions. The top reasons a content management company will go out of business:
No. 5: You forgot to eat your own dog food. I’m amazed at the number of companies that offer content management options while their own Web content and marketing materials haven’t been updated since 1997. If you have the teams that can deliver for your customers, let them practice on your real estate first. Would you buy a suit from a man wearing rags? Maybe, but many people wouldn’t.
No. 4: Your customers hate you. The best technology in the world won’t save you if your own customers tell everyone that you’re a jerk. Please don’t ever tell your customers that it’s their fault if they can’t figure out how to use your products. Yes, content management is not rocket science, and yes, some people are amazingly nontechnical. That doesn’t excuse elitism, and if the words “The customer is just stupid” have ever come out of your mouth, you may deserve to go out of business. It sounds like I’m making this up. I’m not.
No. 3: You try to develop everything in-house. The market is moving fast, your R&D teams can’t always keep up. This isn’t necessarily a weakness — sometimes you need to pick your differentiators and source the other items. If you find that you’re missing release deadlines again and again on items readily available from other vendors or as open source, please evaluate your business model. You’re burning cash for fun, not profit.
No. 2: You disregard trends. I’ll say it again. The market moves fast and what’s on the horizon sometimes seems just plain silly at first. But we’ve all heard the famous miscalculation that the world only has need for about five computers — the smartest people have made mistakes. For those who have told me that “Green is just a fad” and “Blogs are overrated,” (both of those are direct, recent quotes) be careful of what you dismiss. Don’t fall behind your competitors because you personally drive a Hummer and wear polar bear fur earmuffs (that’s a green reference, people). Fads and trends have a way of catching on, becoming important, and filling real business needs. Be open to change, and maybe your revenue will grow.
No. 1: Your employees turn over faster than the toilet paper is changed in the corporate restroom. Whether the job market is tight or technology workers seem a dime a dozen, employees are the face of your company. If they’re leaving in droves, or you’re replacing them quarterly, it’s a morale killer and your customers sense it.
If you’re into content management, or in a broader sense, information management, I hope you’ll pop in occasionally at one of my new homes on the web. (RSS feed here)
I’m part of Information Week’s blog crew and recently started covering all things related to content and information management. And what the heck isn’t related to managing content these days? It’s such a broad topic I know, but my goal is to bring a business person’s voice to it all.
If you’re a vendor, make your PR pros earn their money by sending along story ideas and vendor news. If you’re a client and want to get some pub on how you’ve mastered the content beast, you can also drop me a line.
Here’s some of my latest posts..and as always, thanks for reading.
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.
If you’re familiar with Twitter, you’ve probably figured out there’s some interesting things you can do with these types of SMS-based apps. If you’re a power Twitterer all of you know it’s way more than “what am I doing”. Jaiku’s the other one, and although essentially both provide the same capabilities, I give an aesthetic edge to Jaiku for its slick looking badges. That aside, while working on a community project yesterday, we started thinking about how these tools can benefit the business. If you extrapolate what’s being done by some of the big brands, it’s pretty easy to see the evolution. Take ZDNet for instance. Their approach aggregates all of their blogs into one Twitter feed. Using something like TwitKu, (screenshot below) I get a pulse of what ZDNet is covering that hour. And ZDNet knows most people won’t have the inclination to subscribe to all of their blogs, so they give us options. That’s an important notion when building your business case. Always give the user options. If you want to be a media company, act like one. Show me how to consume, repurpose, mashup, and deliver your content not just in ways you want but ways I want.
Other companies, including Dell and the NYTimes, also use use Twitter to push out all sorts of content, from product updates and discounts to industry information and news. And isn’t it a bit ironic that the NY Times is so prolific on Twitter? They came across as a skeptic back in April.
So know that we know there’s some real-world scenarios for this stuff, the question becomes how to best incorporate these communication tools into an integrated and cohesive marketing strategy? I’d suggest start by stripping away all the Web 2.0 monikers and buzzwords and boil it down to content and communication. From there think about what everyone else is thinking about. How do I come up with creative ways to distribute my content? After that, think about how to be a facilitator. Once a brand becomes a trusted information source or content provider, conversations happen. Tools like Twitter and Jaiku can drive those conversations. And conversations build brand.
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..
Everyday there’s hundreds of instances where the rise of social media is impacting the way we think, share ideas, and bring about change. The latest incarnation comes from a 23 year-old graphic designer from Pennsylvania. iJustine, as she’s known, filmed herself opening up her iPhone bill from AT&T and sparked enough of a viral trend to surpass 300K views on YouTube so far.
I can hear it now.
Have you seen that video on YouTube?! Makes us look like a bunch of idiots I tell you.
During a press briefing in Seoul, Google’s Eric Schmidt was asked about the flavors of today’s evolving Web, specifically Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. Before describing Web 2.0 as a “marketing term” and distilling it down to AJAX, Schmidt told the reporter, “as far as Web 3.0, I think you just invented the term.”
Apparently Schmidt’s oversimplification of Web 2.0 has folks amused. I noticed several Twitters ( or is it Tweets?) within the hour of posting this poking fun at Schmidt’s take.
And while it’s obvious AJAX improves the way we interact with content on the web, it’s just technology. Web (whatever the number) dot oh won’t be remembered under the brand of any technology. It’ll be remembered in terms of our collective experiences. I can see the nostalgic headlines already, “Web 2.0, The Era We Made Contact” or “Web 2.0, The True User Experience.”
Schmidt went on to guess at what the next rev of the Web might bring, essentially describing a world of lightweight mashups accessible on any device and pulling the their data from “the cloud.” He finished by predicting the applications would be distributed virally, through social networks, email, and other forms of electronic communications.
If you’re not, take a look at a recent document I received from Scott Niesen, head marketer at Attensa. If you don’t know Attensa, you’re in for a treat. Their new feedreader tool sits nicely inside Outlook and brings a unique spin to feed reading via their “River of News” view and AttentionStreamâ„¢ technology.
Through ongoing analysis of AttentionStreamâ„¢ data, including the time and frequency that feeds are accessed and articles read, deleted and ignored, Attensa displays feeds in a prioritized list based on the likelihood that they will be of interest to the reader. Subscriptions can be displayed in a “River of News” view that simulates a single news feed, regardless of how many RSS feeds
And Scott and I had a good exchange about sharing some of Attensa’s inner RSS workings. When I told him I should just blog the whole document, he quickly fired back that “marketing is all about experiments and a little risk.”
My tough love for CMOs these days is “adapt or die”. Your required portfolio (as well as other c-suite peers) is changing fast and that change is usually summed up in one word. Digital. The CMO in today’s organization better be a curious technician, a keen analyst, and comfortable building a business case. If XML, RSS, and SaaS look like alphabet soup, you might want to keep reading.
They (CMOs) often don’t have the direct marketing, analytic/segmentation and customer-relationship-management-consultative skills to lead integrated media and marketing programs, combining general advertising, branding, direct, promotion, PR and digital elements.
Today’s marketing world is less and less about stand-alone campaigns that use one medium at a time and more about an integrated approach that speaks to your customers when and where they want. The kicker there is just because you find your market, doesn’t mean they’re ready to engage. Gundersen expands a bit further using the increasingly pervasive “micro” term, used to describe everything from the nature of today’s content to the characteristics of markets.
We are moving toward a marketing world that is driven by a direct-marketing opt-in, predictive modeling and tracking approach. Marketing in the future will not be about the masses but about understanding micro-segments of customers and using tools that enable marketing to get more granular and take campaigns to a one-to-one level.
I heard someone describe it recently as “customers are now looking for marketers instead of marketers looking for customers”. That’s earth-shattering, if not exciting.
Yesterday’s BusinessWire breakfast was proof that some PR firms do get it. It also proved if the jury’s still out on their capabilities, they’re plugging in the right people to execute. Enter Waggener Edstrom and their new digital duo Jim Olson and David Almacy. Both were asked by BusinessWire to host their so-called “wireside” chat about PR in the Digital Age. I actually Twittered some of the session from my Blackberry Pearl, at one point looking up during a post as Almacy remarked that, “some of you might be Twittering this presentation right now.” I looked up to see a bunch of blank stares. Oh well, nice try David.
Olson, a big brand guy and former VP at Overture, kicked off the discussion with his list of digital trends. One of the things he confirmed was what we’re all seeing happen in front of us — video. As he put it, the web now is in full motion and has a voice. Video is mainstream.
( Jim Olson and David Almacy | Pics taken by Blackberry Pearl)
The second point was the broad notion of “interactivity“, where users are now part of the mix — like it or not. Citing the oft-used citizen journalism term, Olson explained how media companies have had to rethink the way news is produced and delivered.
Individual Addressability was another term Olson used to describe the ability to tailor content to the right constituents. This is a big one in a lot of ways. It brings the Long Tail into the fold and helps all of us get a clearer picture of the impact of our marketing and advertising spend. Olson quoted the old advertising saying, “I know half my advertising dollars are wasted - I just don’t know which half!” Well folks, that’s a changing. And that’s the lure of content with digital DNA.
The last few points dealt with the potential ramifications of a growing global internet community and the proliferation of mobile devices. On the former, Olson pointed to statistics showing how China will soon surpass the U.S. with more than 200M internet users. The numbers aren’t so surprising for a country of more than a billion, but the message was more about preparation. Think about the challenges (cultural, technological) that poses for U.S. marketers. Olson was dead on titling the slide, “The Revolution is not being televised.”
The last digital piece he dissected was the mobile movement, drawing a definitive stake in the sand by proclaiming, “Mobile is the new PC”. He reminded us more than half the planet’s mobile devices are in developing countries. A fitting end to his pitch was a quote from GE’s CEO - “I want my communicators to be role models for creativity and innovation.”
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Last week Reuters UK reported that Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS) rejected the latest bid from WPP, the world’s second largest ad firm. 
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