İsletme 2.0: Dijital Çağın İşletmesi

Implementing Enterprise 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 16:14:00 +0000

Enterprise 2.0 is the concept of using tools and services that employ Web 2.0 techniques such as tagging, ratings, networking, RSS, and sharing in the context of the enterprise. The term "Enterprise 2.0" was coined by Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School in an article in the spring 2006 issue of the Sloan Management Review (see Resources). His idea of Enterprise 2.0 makes use of Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis and blogs inside the corporate intranet. In addition to this, many organizations are also publishing corporate blogs on their Web sites and inviting customers and clients to openly comment and discuss their content as part of Enterprise 2.0. Similarly, many companies are creating enterprise wikis that can be viewed and edited by anyone in the world.

Enterprise 2.0 tools and services take advantage of social software features such as social bookmarking and linking, tagging, rating, user commenting and discussion, open creation and editing policies, syndication via RSS feeds (see Figure 1), and so on. These tools also incorporate sharing and networking to invite and encourage collaboration and contribution.

Figure 1. RSS feed (viewed in Firefox) for most popular IBM developerWorks tutorials

The relationship between Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0

A topic that is closely related to Enterprise 2.0 is Web 2.0. It is important to note, however, that the concepts are not one and the same, but rather they are two individual areas that are built on top of similar foundations. The term Web 2.0 describes the shift in focus from static and singular media to dynamic, interactive community-oriented social media.

A fine example of this shift is the increasing popularity of the blogosphere. While blogs have been around much longer than the term Web 2.0, they are one of the finest examples of what Web 2.0 is all about. Before blogs, some people published personal Web sites. These were static pages that usually provided biographical information about the owner of the Web site and potentially some photos of his or her family and pets, along with a page containing information on how to be contacted. All of this information is one-way and static. There is no room for interactivity, and as a result, the content becomes dated and useless before long. Once people have seen your photos the first time, they are not likely to feel the need to see them again. If you put new photos on the site, your visitors have no way of knowing you have done so without revisiting the site.

Enter Web 2.0 and blogging. Most popular blogging platforms such as WordPress, Moveable Type, and Blogger allow for the creation of "pages" where you can put biographical information (and easily update it as it becomes outdated) and "posts" where you can write your articles and express your opinions. But blogs are much more than an easy-to-use content management system. Blogs automatically syndicate your content using RSS feeds so that people can "subscribe" to your Web site using an RSS reader and receive timely updates whenever you publish new content. Blogs allow your visitors to comment on your posts, allowing interaction and discussion about the topics at hand. Also, features such as trackbacks and pingbacks notify you when someone has mentioned your blog post on his or her Web site or blog.

The Enterprise 2.0 view of blogging is slightly different. A corporate blog will often be a multi-user blog with multiple authors and contributors, or it will be a platform made up of many different blogs, each individually owned by a different person in the organization. Also, corporate blogging is not so much an extension of any prior concept. Sure, many companies posted bios for their employees on their Web sites in the past, but these were rarely controlled by the employees themselves. Blogging opens the door for employees to express their thoughts on the products and services they are working on and to interact with the community on any new ideas they may have for these products and services (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Oracle blogs, featuring multiple blog contributors (see tag cloud on right)

Many people believe that Enterprise 2.0 is the use of consumer-oriented Web 2.0 services by businesses—services such as Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, and twitter. Going forward, however, the focus on Enterprise 2.0 is going to be in terms of products and services that are specifically targeted at businesses. Major software vendors, including IBM®, Microsoft®, Oracle®, and SAP® have all released Enterprise 2.0-centric products and platforms recently, and it is clear Enterprise 2.0 is an important aspect of the strategy of major players going forward. Forrester Research released a report in April 2008 stating that Enterprise 2.0 will be a USD 4.6 billion industry by 2013, and you can expect a high percentage of this to go to the major software vendors.

Enterprise 2.0 essentials

Moving on from the concepts behind Enterprise, below are some of the ways that Enterprise 2.0 can be implemented.

Folksonomy, or collaborative tagging

In the early days of the World Wide Web, Web site directories such as Yahoo! used a fixed hierarchy known as taxonomy to organize the links in their directory. This is also the case in most document management or file systems—documents and files are organized into directories and subdirectories that must be created first in order to be used. Web 2.0 (and now Enterprise 2.0) suggests the use of folksonomy, the concept of collaborative tagging, instead. This concept suggests that users (not just the creator of the document or file) should be allowed to enter free-form tags to describe and categorize the content they are creating, editing, or viewing. This categorization makes it easier for the document to be found by others looking for the same information at a later date.

Another key feature has arisen from the continued popularity of tagging: tag clouds. Tag clouds allow for instant visual recognition of popular tags by distinguishing the importance of particular terms by increasing font size or using color. Tags are generally listed alphabetically, and clicking on the tag navigates to a page with other pages that are related to that tag. Tag clouds are a prominent feature on many Web 2.0 services such as Flickr and Delicious (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. The Delicious tags page

Social bookmarking

Building on the concept of tagging is the idea of social bookmarking. Social bookmarking allows people to store, manage, and share their bookmarks on the Web. Such services usually suggest that users enter a series of tags with each bookmark to make it easier to find at a later point. Not only has social bookmarking made it much easier to manage catalogs of thousands of bookmarks (try managing such a collection in your browser), but it has also made it easier to share bookmarks with others via RSS feeds. Several tools are available that make it simple for blog and wiki visitors to submit pages to their favorite social bookmarking service in a snap.

Social bookmarking is an integral part of Enterprise 2.0, with offerings such as IBM Lotus Connections (coming soon to developerWorks; see Resources) and Connectbeam Spotlight offering social bookmarking features aimed squarely at the enterprise.

User rating and commenting

Opening content up by allowing users to rate and comment on your content may seem like a daunting exercise to many businesses. Many companies don't like the idea of allowing an open forum on their turf where people can freely criticize and slate their products and services. On the other side of the coin, however, it does open the gates to free-flowing and highly valuable customer feedback and opinions. It also creates a channel of communication that can be used to get to know your customers better and helps forge a lasting relationship where customers are satisfied that you're willing to listen to what they have to say (see Figure 4).

Figure 4. Customer ratings and reviews on Apple's online store

RSS feeds and syndication

RSS has been around since the late 1990s, but it has been one of the key aspects of the success of Web 2.0 services. A Web 2.0 tool that does not feature RSS in some shape or fashion is rare these days, as the power and simplicity of syndicating your content using this technology is so great. Customers can receive instant notification in their RSS readers when you launch a new product, post a new blog post, or add new pictures to your Flickr account. Users can subscribe to your Delicious bookmarks and Twitter updates so they are always up-to-date with your latest offerings.

Mashups and Web APIs

Mashups and Web APIs have offered consumers easy ways of providing Rich Internet Applications that are based upon data sources such as Google Maps for years now. Many useful Web applications have popped up all over the Web as a result, as they mix and mash data from several sources to provide some useful purpose to their end users.

Mashups (see Figure 5) really come into their own, however, when they are tied to a business function. Companies hold all sorts of data about their clients, employees, suppliers, products, services, and financials. They use an array of systems to manage and interact with this data on a daily basis, and as a result, the amount of data they store can be huge. This data is often stored for recording purposes, and may often be used with business intelligence tools to give some value. By mixing this data with the many web APIs that are available, however, companies can create some amazing applications that can add value and reduce costs on a large scale.

Figure 5. An example of a Google Maps mashup

Social networking in the enterprise

Over the past decade, social networks such as Facebook and MySpace have taken the world by storm, with hundreds of millions of users all across the globe. Aimed squarely at the younger generation of net-goers, these networks are the essence of Web 2.0 and what it's all about. Many organizations look at these social networks as a nuisance and a burden on employee productivity, and in many cases they may be correct. Some companies have even gone so far as to ban the use of social networks in the organization, preventing their use by blocking them with their corporate firewalls.

An important aspect of these services that cannot be ignored, however, is the way they allow people to connect with others, building a network of friends and acquaintances. Many of these connections may work for other companies that are potential or existing clients, and this employee's friendship could potentially result in a sales lead. For many years, corporate executives have used the golf course as their social networking base. Now they can use social networks for this task and concentrate on their game when playing golf.

The potential for loss of productivity with these services is still high of course, but this is eliminated to a certain extent with business-oriented social networks such as LinkedIn and PairUp. LinkedIn is a massive network of professionals, each linked to other users as a "Connection". A LinkedIn profile is much like a resume, detailing employment and education history, while allowing people to provide recommendations for one another, much like the concept of references. LinkedIn has several uses in business, one of the most important being recruitment. Hiring new people can be expensive, time consuming, and in the end you may often not end up with the right person for the job. LinkedIn (see Figure 6) can help ease the pain associated with the recruitment process by putting you in touch with highly skilled professionals who are looking for new challenges.

Figure 6. LinkedIn: the business-oriented social network

Enterprise 2.0 social networks are also emerging, such as the IBM Bluehouse network (see Figure 7). These services are aimed at medium to large businesses that want to create an internal social network featuring contact information, blogs and wikis, and reporting structure information for all the employees in a company. The enterprise social network is much like a detailed and personalized corporate directory with features like tagging, social bookmarking, and commenting—all integral components of the network.

Figure 7. IBM Lotus Bluehouse beta -- corporate social networking

Collaborative tools and services

Now I'll show you some collaborative tools and services for implementing an Enterprise 2.0 strategy.

Blogs

The starting point for most organizations looking to invest in an Enterprise 2.0 strategy is the creation of a corporate blog. Often this starts off as a single blog maintained by one person published on the corporate intranet. Other employees can leave comments on posts and subscribe to the blog's RSS feed. As this blog starts to grow, perhaps the blog is expanded to allow for multiple contributors. As the number of contributors grows, you may need to install a platform that offers multiple blogs, with each contributor, or perhaps each product team, having its own blog.

Once your company is actively blogging inside your intranet, it may be time to think about publishing a blog on your company's Web site that can be viewed by your customers and potential new customers alike, allowing you to take in positive and negative feedback and find out the exact thoughts of your clients. Posting regularly about product updates will allow your customers to receive up-to-the-minute notifications via RSS. You could even take it a step further and produce podcasts (basically audio blog posts) or video blog posts.

Wikis

Wikis are a group of Web pages that can be edited by anyone who accesses them. The most famous example of a wiki is the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Wikis usually allow anyone to create new pages and to view and edit existing ones using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. The wiki will keep a revision history of previous versions of the page and any comments made by the person who made the edit. This allows authors to revert to a previous version of the page should incorrect information be posted.

Wikis are becoming a very popular way of managing documents and information inside companies and are an important aspect of Enterprise 2.0. They allow true collaboration on the documents as anyone with access to the page can edit it, making any relevant changes or posting updated content. Most Enterprise 2.0 vendors provide integrated wikis as part of their platforms.

Conferencing and messaging tools

Conferencing tools have been around for a long time now, but in the past they have suffered by requiring everyone attending the conference to have the same software installed on their computers. This meant, for example, that users of Mac OS®, Linux®, and other non-Windows® operating systems could not participate in a Microsoft NetMeeting conference.

The answer to this problem is Web conferencing, and tools and services in this area are growing in popularity. Web conferencing tools usually come as either hosted services or downloadable modules that can be deployed to an organization's own Web server. Common features of Web conferencing software include slide show presentations, real-time instant messaging and chat, VoIP for audio, video functionality, whiteboards, screen sharing facilities, and the ability to record the conference so it can be viewed again at a later date.

The benefits of employing Enterprise 2.0 in an organization

It is important for organizations to understand why they are implementing an Enterprise 2.0 strategy. Following are some of the benefits.

Information access

Information stored in a system that is Enterprise 2.0-enabled allows employees and other stakeholders in the organization to access information that is timely, up-to-date, and relevant to their needs from anywhere in the world, as long as they have Internet access. With the increase in availability in Wi-Fi and 3G networks, they can get this information on their mobile devices instantly whether they are waiting in an airport or sitting at home.

Instant notification

When new updates are made to your blog or wiki, subscribers to your company's RSS feeds can get instant notification via their RSS readers on their computers or cell phones. No longer do people have to keep returning to your Web site to see if it has been updated. With RSS, when people do revisit your site, you'll know it is for another specific purpose.

Simplicity and cost effectiveness

Web 2.0 and indeed Enterprise 2.0 strive to make it simpler and less expensive for individuals and businesses alike to share information, communicate with each other, and collaborate on projects. Enterprise 2.0 services are, by their nature, simple to set up and use. Many Web 2.0 services are available free-of-charge, but even pay-for Enterprise 2.0 tools tend to be inexpensive compared to their bloated predecessors.

Potential pitfalls and issues

Below are some potential pitfalls and issues in implementing an Enterprise 2.0 solution.

Security

A major issue with Enterprise 2.0 tools is the area of security. The World Wide Web is renowned for being a major source of security threats in terms of hackers, viruses, malware, and so on. Traditionally, companies maintained a tight seal on any information that was exposed to the outside world and held strict controls on their internal document management systems. Wikis, for example, allow anyone to create and edit content—employees can potentially (knowingly or unknowingly) publish information on an external wiki that was meant for internal eyes only. This can lead to major consequences should something like detailed product design documents fall into the hands of competitors.

Web 2.0 is all about sharing and openness, but Enterprise 2.0 is less so. The major software vendors are all working on Enterprise 2.0 platforms, and security issues such as these are certain to be addressed. The important thing for organizations implementing an Enterprise 2.0 system is that they ensure a correct balance of security and protection and openness and sharing. Without security, confidential information may be at risk, but without sharing, Enterprise 2.0 is defunct.

Loss of productivity

A huge concern for companies when adopting new and emerging technologies that incorporate ideas such as social networking and social bookmarking is that employees will waste a lot of time "playing" with such features. Many major companies have already taken steps to ban employees from using social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, and they may have the same concerns about any corporate social tools.

It is important that companies try to find a balance here, where the usefulness of the tools is not overshadowed by employees wasting valuable time using them. That being said, corporate social networks are unlikely to feature "Poke" applications and customizable layouts, which are a common source of procrastination in the workplace. They are more likely to center on building connections with other employees, perhaps in other parts of the organization, and creating relationships to better their productivity, not reduce it.

Lack of adoption by staff

Depending on the age profile of your staff, you may run into issues with lack of adoption and a fear of the unknown. Younger employees are going to be more open to the idea of trying out new features and software and spending some time helping the system to grow. Older employees, many of whom may not like using computers and avoid doing so as much as possible, are less likely to embrace emerging concepts such as Enterprise 2.0.

Summary

Enterprise 2.0 is not a cutting edge phenomenon. The technologies surrounding it are certainly not new, and the concepts behind it have been prevalent in Web 2.0 consumer-oriented services for a number of years now. Enterprise 2.0 has been slow to catch on because companies were afraid that it was just another catchy buzzword that would die away as quickly as it came along. They were afraid that Web 2.0 would not last, and before long Web 3.0 would arrive and all their hard work implementing new technology would be deprecated. They were also slow to adopt products and services from companies that have been in existence for just several months rather than several decades. A plethora of new companies have formed around the provision of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 services, and it remains to be seen how many of these will be there in the long run.

What is certain, however, is that Enterprise 2.0 is finally ready to launch into the mainstream business market. Major software vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle are all readying new technology offerings that are loaded with Enterprise 2.0 features such as blogs, wikis, social networking, and social bookmarking tools—so expect to see such tools in your business very soon.

By Joe Lennon, Software Developer, Core International

B2B Marketing 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 15:43:00 +0000

By Bob Thompson, CustomerThink Corp.

Buyers in businesses have embraced the web and social media tools to find and research solutions, just like individual consumers. Of course, a "considered" purchase of an enterprise software system costing $50,000 or more is much more complex than buying a $200 digital camera.

51 percent of marketing organizations are using lead management systems and 60 percent are using some form of lead scoring before passing leads to sales.

Still, the process often starts with research on the web and ends with a purchase. Business-to-business (B2B) marketers are optimizing what happens in the middle with strategies and tools to engage with buyers more effectively, and increase the flow of qualified leads to sales reps.

B2B marketing tools, first introduced a decade ago, have moved into the mainstream. CSO Insights' 2008 Lead Life Cycle Optimization study found that technology is playing a larger role: 51 percent of marketing organizations are using lead management systems and 60 percent are using some form of lead scoring before passing leads to sales. The global economic crisis may boost demand further, because it has "turned the spotlight on improving efficiency," says Will Schnabel, Silverpop's VP of international markets and former CEO of Vtrenz, a lead management pioneer acquired in 2007 by Silverpop.

Buyer-Centricity

Alight, a software maker of planning tools for finance and product managers, exemplifies a new breed B2B marketer that matches marketing and buying processes. Typically buyers find Alight through a Google search with keywords like "budgeting software" and then click on a paid ad promising to help the buyer "learn the 5 capabilities budgeting software should deliver." A landing page invites the prospect to fill out a short form to view an online demo.

Whether the offer is a white paper, webinar, demo or free trial, there's nothing remarkable about this. Anyone can easily place ads on Google or other search engines, create a registration form, and collect "leads."

The key is how these leads—more accurately called contacts or inquiries—are handled. Done right, it's magical. Alight uses Marketo's lead management solution to collect the leads, generate stats on what users do after they click, and hand over qualified leads to sales via a Salesforce.com connection. Prospects who don't reply immediately to a phone call are put on an automated "nurturing" program to received targeted messages with other offers designed to revive interest at a future date.

Quite possibly the company couldn't exist without this "B2B marketing 2.0" approach. According to Alight's VP of Sales Ben Lamorte, VCs didn't think the company could sell software solutions to mid-market enterprises at a price point from $10,000 to $50,000 without expensive feet on the street—which can increase the cost of sales to the point that the business model isn't viable. Alight is beating conventional wisdom by combining effective search campaigns with affordable tools like Marketo for lead management, Salesforce.com for sales automation, Citrix GoToMeeting for online meetings, and Camtasia to turn recorded demos into short video clips.

Understanding the Buying Process

Consumers research online, so do business buyers. A 2007 study by Enquiro Search Solutions found that 65.3 percent of B2B prospects in the Awareness phase started their search with general search engines. As they move through the Research and Negotiation phases, prospects increase their usage of B2B vertical search engines and vendor web sites.

B2B Search Activity by Buying Phase: (Source: Enquiro)

It's critical, therefore, for B2B marketers to have an effective search strategy, both organic and paid, to engage with the prospect during online research. The prospect must be served up content and offers that are appropriate for the stage of the buying process.

Awareness: Starting out, prospects will use general search terms and be attracted to educational white papers and webinars.
Research: Digging deeper, prospects will search on specific solution and brand names, and are more likely to respond to demos and free trials.
Negotiation: During the final decision-making phase, buyers will search with comparison and review terms, and consume content that pits one vendor against another.

Who makes the purchase happen? In most B2B transactions, sales reps do. And what do sales reps need? Qualified leads, that's what.

Giving the right offer at the right time is not as simple as it sounds. It doesn't make sense, for example, to offer a high-level white paper that buyers will read in the awareness phase, and then treat these as qualified leads. Sales will be frustrated and the money generating these prospects will be wasted. But if marketers only target those ready to buy immediately, by the time the buyer is ready to make a decision, the vendor/solution may not be in prospect's "consideration set"—a mental short list of options that the buyer is seriously considering.

Serena Software, a maker of software development tools, discovered it was introducing a free trial too early in the marketing process. Michaline Todd, Director of Corporate Marketing, said this resulted in too many unqualified prospects because they weren't sufficiently educated on Serena's solutions and pricing. Now trial offers are introduced more strategically and Serena uses a solution from MarketBright to manage web content in a more "flexible and agile" way.

Working Backwards From Revenue Goal

The key to success in B2B marketing is working backwards from the main business goal: revenue. Marketing, after all, doesn't directly produce revenue, only a purchase does.

Who makes the purchase happen? In most B2B transactions, sales reps do. And what do sales reps need? Qualified leads, that's what. In fact, a major conclusion of CustomerThink's 2008 sales productivity study was that sales executives should "focus on getting more of the right prospects into the funnel to begin with, then ensure that you invest sales time on those properly qualified."

So what really matters is the flow of qualified leads. But what, exactly, is a "qualified," or as some call it, a "sales-ready" lead? Forrester analyst Laura Ramos, who has been researching B2B marketing best practices for the past three years, say a lead is qualified "where there has been a series of interactions that demonstrate to sales that prospect has moved from early awareness to consideration."

In other words, a lead is much more than a prospect filling out a web form. This indicates interest, but that's it. Savvy sales reps won't waste their time culling through lists of these so-called "leads" to find a few good prospects. Instead, they cherry pick a few contacts from companies that look promising, ignore the rest, and thus waste most of the marketing investment.

Breaking Marketing and Sales Gridlock

It's not easy to get two organizations with different ideologies to agree on anything. Witness the limited success U.S. President Obama has had getting agreement between the Democrats and Republicans. They just see the world differently.

So, too, is the case between marketing and sales. Marketers are often rewarded for lead volume, so they generate leads that aren't a good use of sales time. Quota-focused reps, on the other hand, don't want to spend time on opportunities unless they are ready to buy now. Result: potentially good prospects are either never called, or called once and forgotten. Marketing and sales, like political opponents, then play the blame game when revenue falls short of plan.

While sales reps may never fully appreciate the value of brand marketing, and marketing professionals may not understand the art involved in selling, they can create common ground around lead qualification. Barry Trailer, managing partner with CSO Insights, agrees that "technology gives leverage if you use appropriately," but adds that scoring leads is a critical activity, because you need a systematic way to decide whether a lead is sales worthy. Even new companies with no history can convene experienced sales reps in a session to build a "perfect prospect profile"—prospects that would close 80 percent of the time. This profile would include demographics and psychographics.

Marketing can add value by providing intelligence on the behavior of prospects online. Eloqua co-founder and CTO Steven Woods calls this "digital body language." Much like a rep would look for signs of prospect interest in a face-to-face meeting, interest can be assessed with online prospects by analyzing what content is accessed; the frequency and depth of interaction; and even when others from the same organization take a peek. Ideally, marketing and sales executives should agree on a scoring method to include all the relevant factors and decide what score meets the sales-ready threshold.

Finally, marketers can provide tools to directly help reps interact with their prospects. Erik Bower, co-founder of Marketbright, believes that "social selling" is the next wave of innovation. The company's just released Prospect Portal makes it easy to "give prospects their own water cooler" with a micro-portal that a sales rep can deploy for individual prospects. Reps can publish content, events and messages, plus enable the prospect to share information with colleagues involved in the buying decision. The prospect should get a better buying experience while the rep improves selling effectiveness.

Return on Innovation

In this economy, what's the case to spend money on B2B marketing automation solution? To be sure, there's plenty to gain by making existing processes work incrementally better. But keep an open mind, because the Web 2.0 era is making innovate new approaches viable, too.

Optimize search investments. This is the low-hanging fruit right now, says Marketo's CEO Phil Fernandez. Clicks on B2B ads can cost $7 to $10 each, and some B2B marketers spend tens of thousands per month on Google. Using analytics to increase conversion rates will put more leads into the funnel at the same spending level, or allow a marketer to maintain lead volume when budgets get whacked.
Warm up cold leads. Most marketers have stockpiles of dormant contacts that never went anywhere. Experts estimate that around 10 percent of these so-called "cold" leads will eventually become warm again, if properly nurtured. One company told me that of 30,000 contacts acquired, about 1500 re-engage each month, thanks to nurturing. That's a lot of extra value extracted out of a sunk marketing cost.
Improve marketing and sales process. At Enquiro, the same outfit that did the B2B research mentioned earlier, they used to generate leads via a white paper offer, then give ("dump" might be a better term) them all to reps. Now they score leads with Marketo and only send promising leads to reps. "Sales reps love the process," says marketing director Spoeth, and marketing efficiency has been improved, too.
Support new business models. Clever use of search and B2B marketing/sales technologies can enable a company to tackle markets that are not viable with traditional approaches. Acteva, an event registration service, can quickly set up and manage campaigns targeted to different vertical markets. Each campaign includes tailored landing page, email, lead routing and reporting. Doing this with the old process, which involved conventional web page design and IT coding, was too time consuming to even consider, according to marketing director Elias Terman.

Tips for Success

Industry experts agree that the best B2B marketers understand precisely how their prospect buy, work to integrate marketing with sales, and deploy the right technology for the right jobs. To improve your odds of success, follow these words of advice.

First, as Andrew Spoeth, Enquiro's Director of Marketing advises, invest quality time to understand exactly how the customer really buys, both online and offline. Online research, focus groups and usability testing can all play a role. You may be surprised to learn, Spoeth says, that "the buying process doesn't follow a neat progression" as you might expect from looking the typical buying funnel. People jump around, so be prepared to engage when the buyer is ready.

Marketing and sales leaders must then clearly define a "qualified lead" and agree to work together toward a common goal. Their boss can encourage this by giving them shared revenue objectives, and fixing measurement systems that motivate lead volume over quality. Developing a mutually agreed leading scoring and reporting process is crucial.

To engage with prospective buyers, the right offer delivered at the right time is paramount. Billy Martin, VP of Marketing at Weather Trends International, said the company uses Eloqua's system to help deliver messages that are "high value and relevant" at a frequency that will increase engagement, not stimulate opt-out behavior.

Finally, deploy the right solutions. Eloqua and Vtrenz pioneered B2B marketing solutions a decade ago, and now offer powerful suites of functionality. As the industry has expanded and matured, upstarts like Marketo and Marketbright have entered with fresh designs and innovative features. And, there are many more solutions in the market from specialty vendors, while mainstream CRM vendors are adding basic capabilities that are bound to grow over time.

In the end, the point of B2B marketing is not about contact generation, it's about creating qualified opportunities for reps and increasing revenue. Marketing needs creative professionals, and sales needs artful reps to close deals. But both can benefit by taking a more systematic approach to B2B lead management, to better connect with buyers and increase the overall effectiveness of the marketing/sales process.

Government 2.0 trends to watch

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 09:33:00 +0000

The winds of change are blowing in the government marketplace, and nowhere is that change more felt than in the realm of web-based communications. For the latest in Government 2.0 trends, we recently sat down with Andrea Baker, director of technology and self-described “social web evangelist,” who works with Navstar, a Falls, Church, Va.-based provider of IT services for the government and private sectors. Here Baker shares the latest in social media trends and how organizations can use dynamic web tools in their organizations and on behalf of their government clients.

Could you tell us what a social web evangelist does?

Andrea Baker: I borrowed the term “evangelist” after I met Anil Dash, a Vice President of Six Apart, a social blogging software platform, last fall. He called himself an evangelist on his business card. He inspired me with what he was doing in bringing better blogging software to the world. I look to use the phrase “social web evangelist” to help the user experience with new tools, how to use the tools and improve productivity.
What are your thoughts on the term Web 2.0?

Andrea Baker: I don’t like the term Web 2.0. It puts us in an ordered state and I don’t think that the web is very orderly. There is always a new tool, a new technology coming out. If we say Web 2.0 today, what is it next week? Hopefully, something better. I like to put the web in 3 different stages: There was the web as we knew it prior to this fusion of the user-oriented web and then the next phase should be the semantic web. Right now we’re still in the user-interactive web space.

What’s your role with Navstar?

Andrea Baker: I’ve been with Navstar for two years now and I am the director of technology. I help not only the intelligence community, but also Navstar embrace social web tools as part of their business process and bringing that expertise to other areas in federal government. I am helping to build the knowledge of enterprise collaboration inside the company as well.

How do you keep up with the pulse of new technologies?

Andrea Baker: I definitely have to keep reading. There are several tricks for how I try to keep up with what’s going on. One way is using Twitter, a microblogging software platform that I’ve embraced and have been using a little more than a year. When a new social web tool pops up on the radar, usually the other leading edge technologists grab on to it and tell others about it through Twitter. Another way is that I have my Google Alerts set up to notify me. Additionally I utilize RSS feeds to subscribe to certain technology blogs. Usually another technologist gets a tip off about something and they then share their experience or give a link to a beta platform. It also helps to be involved in the Washington area technology scene. We have a lot of good technologists in the area developing their own social web tools.

Can you share some possible future trends in the social web space of interest to the government contracting community?

Andrea Baker: In the intelligence community, we want to use more widgets and mash-ups. The rest of the world is already embracing these technologies. When a technology emerges, someone else comes along and creates a symbiotic technology that works with it. However, we don’t yet have these connective widgets inside the federal government since we’re just still getting used to platforms such as wikis and blogs. So, we’re looking at real life examples and checking how we can bring those into the government.

I’ve seen widgets (e.g., AdaptiveBlue) — should the govt make their own widgets?

Andrea Baker: Yes and no. Yes, we should create our own, if possible, because we have certain tools and software applications that are not available to commercial companies. However, there are many technologies out there that we can borrow from and adapt. AdaptiveBlue is a good example and I have that on my personal blog. It hyperlinks a specific word or term, and the link takes you to more information — so simple and yet so complex but we don’t yet have that inside the government. If we were to have something like AdaptiveBlue on, say, the word “China” on Intellipedia, we would be able to find out a whole lot more just by clicking on that word.

Any other social media trends for executives with government clients to keep on their radar?

Andrea Baker: I mentioned Twitter before. One of the things I like that we’re testing at Navstar is a tool called Yammer, a TechCrunch 50 award winner. The Yammer tool is a take-off of what Twitter is for the rest of the world as massive-social messaging software. This tool is used for a group and you attach it to your email domain. At Navstar we are using Yammer to communicate internally throughout the rest of the dispersed Navstar family. For the federal government we would like to use a tool like Yammer or Twitter to talk to each other, share links. It’s something we’re looking into and whether to bring a tool like this inside the various networks.

What’s the next step in blog evolution?

Andrea Baker: I’d like to see an evolution of blogs as the next step for us. We use WordPress blogs as our platform in the federal government. Everybody is blogging and sharing information, which is great. Now we want to take it to the next level with smarter blogs. We want to bring in more plug-ins and other complimentary technologies to increase the value of our blog posts. It would also make the information easier to find. We’re always looking for better technologies to increase the findability of information that we’ve already been creating.

Any final thoughts?

Andrea Baker: We need to engage with potential customers and other colleagues and find the way they’re communicating and join into the conversation. You should talk about your brand (company or organization) and listen for people talking about you. We’ve already mentioned Twitter, I use that daily to be a part of the world’s conversation. I also believe corporations and executives should be blogging on their corporate websites, to let us know what they’re about, in order to reach out to potential and existing customers.

By JD Kathuria

26 Aralık Günü Dersimizin Konuğu: Sarper Danış

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 14:22:00 +0000

Konu: "Advertising 2.0"

Konuşan(lar):

1) Sarper Danış
2) Yüce Zerey

Dijital Reklam Dünyasında, doygun altyapısını tükenmek bilmeyen enerjisi ve özgün yeteneği ile birleştirmiş ender profesyonellerden olan Sarper Danış , bu hafta bizlere Advertising 2.0 konusunu anlatacak. Sarper'i dinlemek için ben 26 Aralık Cuma günü Saat 19.00 da Bilgi Üniversitesi Santral Kampüsü'ndeyim.

Peki ya siz?
Sarper Danış da kim oluyor diyecek olursanız:

"Sarper Danış Türkiye'nin lider interaktif ajanslarından Zap Medya'nın yönetici ortağıdır. Online reklam ve pazarlama iletişimi alanında 10 seneyi aşkın süredir çalışmakta ve danışmanlık yapmaktadır. A'dan Z'ye; bir markanın internette yaratılması, konumlandırılması, sunumu, müşteri ilişkileri, satış ve geri dönüşleri gibi konularda deneyimlerini hizmet verdiği ajans ve müşterileriyle paylaşmaktadır. Şirkete katıldığı son 4 senede, Zap Medya finansal ve fiziksel anlamda 10 kat büyümüş, interaktif alanda satınalmalar gerçekleştirmiş ve uluslararası bir şirket olmuştur.

Zap Medya'da internet ve medya stratejileri, SEO - SEM ve arge departmanlarına liderlik yapan Danış, aynı zamanda mecraya yenilikler getirme yolundaki çalışmalarını sürdürmektedir. İnteraktif reklamcılığın hiçbir zaman durmayacağı ve gelişerek süreceğini savunan ve Türkiye'de internet reklamcılığının gelişimi için fikirler üreten Danış, IAB Türkiye'nin kuruluşunda da yer almıştır.

1994 İstanbul Lisesi ve 1999 Marmara Üniversitesi Almanca Enformatik mezunudur. Eğitimi sırasında 1996-1997 senesinde Almanya - Bielefeld Üniversitesi Avrupa İşletme Bilimleri ve 1998-2000 senesinde Almanya - Lüneburg Üniversitesinde MIS eğitimleri aldı. Deutche Telekom'da pazarlama ve teknoloji, Carat Medya'da interaktif medya ve Plus v.2 Ajansı'nda interaktif proje yönetimi konularında görevler almıştır. Danış, 2004 senesinden beri Zap Medya'da çalışmaktadır.

1976 doğumlu Sarper Danış İstanbul'da yaşamaktadır."

Can Web 2.0 really work for Enterprise 2.0?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 14:04:00 +0000

In spite of its roaring success on consumer IT desktops, considerable scepticism still remains about the value of Web 2.0 in business organisations. Can Web 2.0 technologies like wikis, blogs and social networking really help to grow a business and make the leap to Enterprise 2.0?

Like open source, Web 2.0 concepts now deserve corporate consideration

It used to be the case that open source was a momentary distraction for CIOs and IT directors. Not so any more. More companies are asking their IT leaders to apply open source to their corporate IT strategies. The same cannot yet be said of Web 2.0 technologies, but we expect Web 2.0 to creep its way into the vernacular of business software over the coming years.

The success of consumer-led Web 2.0 technologies cannot be ignored. Facebook, MySpace, blogs, RSS, mash-ups, Ajax and a myriad of other web-based technologies all now rally under the Web 2.0 banner. Some of these are now starting to show potential behind corporate firewalls to facilitate more effective forms of collaboration (beyond standard email) and provide a richer, more interactive information experience for business IT users - i.e. the two-way use of the Web that allows users not only to access information but also to express their own knowledge.

Enterprise software vendors are also starting to bake 2.0 capabilities into their applications. For example, SAP uses wikis and blogs extensively on its SDN, and Oracle has built social networking into a broad-release CRM offering.

Think of Web 2.0 not as a tool but as an information experience

While many Web 2.0 technologies are now deployed for enterprise use, they are still a long way from being mature or universal. The trick is to figure out how to take Web 2.0 ideas and use them in a business environment to interact better with employees, customers and suppliers. It's not a direct translation. IT users have distinct needs from consumers, and organisations will have to carefully target, evaluate and refine their initial Web 2.0 deployments.

In particular, we believe that companies should consider Web 2.0 not in terms of technology but as an enhanced web information experience for solving business problems. For example, instead of looking at blog-style publishing, wiki-style editing and social networking as just tools, enterprises should frame their use in business scenarios or goals, both within and outside the four walls of the enterprise - e.g. as a way to better engage with their most profitable customers or build up a stronger corporate online brand.

Importantly, Web 2.0 is also about advancing information experiences for business users, helping them to make the most of the systems and data management investments that a company has already put in place. Web 2.0 helps to make IT systems user-friendly and accessible. It allows for communities of interest to be built from crowds of business users looking at certain slices of corporate information.

Finally, Web 2.0 information experience also calls for a bi-directional link between users and information. One of the biggest benefits of Web 2.0 is the opportunity to use the activities and business domain expertise within businesses as they interact with information. Rather than being passive information consumers, users participate in its creation and organisation through tagging, commentary and ranking.

Web 2.0 remains a leap of faith for many companies, but one worth risking

Adding Web 2.0 to an enterprise context also represents a democratic and social shift for a company's IT strategy, moving control from the organisation's IT department to individual users. But traditional views of enterprise IT are still relatively conservative right now. Few companies are prepared to look outside the box at unproven Web 2.0 models, especially in tight economic times.

As with any new and evolving technology, implementing Web 2.0 tools is a risk. The risk is more pronounced given the unclear return on investment from their use - which is ultimately measured in how effectively people collaborate, as opposed to business optimisation or revenue-generating ideas.

Only when companies start to understand the information democratising benefits of these tools, the specific business case scenarios for uses of the applications, and the effort and cost of implementing them will we see wide-scale adoption.

By Madan Sheina

The Top 10 Enterprise 2.0 Stories of 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 08:59:00 +0000

The enterprise 2.0 space saw good action this year. I’ve had a chance to see it up close, starting the year with BEA Systems (now Oracle) and closing out the year with Connectbeam. I think it’s fair to say that in 2007, social software was still something of a missionary sale. In 2008, company inquiries increased a lot. The burden still falls on the vendors to articulate business benefits, adoption strategies and use cases. But enterprise customers are now partners in this work.

So let’s get to it. Here are my top ten stories for the year:

1. Activity Streams

Facebook really got this going with its newsfeed, and FriendFeed took it to an art form with its lifestreaming service. In 2008, many vendors added activity streams to their applications: Connectbeam, BEA Systems, Atlassian, SocialText, Jive Software and others. Activity streams are great for improving awareness of colleagues’ activities, and adding a new searchable object: actions.

2. Forrester’s $4.6 Billion Forecast

Forrester Research made a splash with its forecast that Enterprise 2.0 will be a $4.6 billion market by 2013. The ReadWriteWeb story about it has been bookmarked to Del.icio.us 386 times and counting. Forrester’s projections provided a solid analytical framework for the different tools, used internally and externally. According to the analysis, social networking will be the most popular tool for companies. Whether you buy the forecast or not, they remain the best-known, most visible numbers to date.

3. Oracle Beehive

Larry Ellison is fond of essentially dismissing SaaS. He does not have Oracle invest much in the trend. But Oracle did seem to embrace Enterprise 2.0 in a big way this year with Beehive, which is an “integrated set of collaboration services.” The New York Times quotes Oracle EVP Chuck Rozwat: “It is a product we built from scratch over the last three years.” Now since Oracle is a huge enterprise software company, there’s plenty of skepticism about the capabilities and innovation of Beehive. But there’s no denying that Oracle has the ear of the enterprise, and picks up a lot of market intelligence through its customer base. While Beehive itself may or may not succeed, the idea that Oracle came out with Beehive was a big story.

4. AIIM/McKinsey Surveys

Research and consulting firms AIIM and McKinsey each came out with surveys of corporate interest in enterprise 2.0. The AIIM survey looked at levels of awareness and interest among different Enterprise 2.0 technologies. AIIM also took a fairly expansive view of social software. The top 3 “Enterprise 2.0″ technologies in terms of corporate awareness? Email, instant messaging, search. That’s actually a funny list, yet there are lessons there for vendors and consultants in the social software industry. If those are entrenched, can you play nicely with them? One other quote I like from the report:

This study of 441 end users found that a majority of organizations recognize Enterprise 2.0 as critical to the success of their business goals and objectives, but that most do not have a clear understanding of what Enterprise 2.0 is.

McKinsey’s survey of enterprises looked at the interest in various tools as well. It also asked respondents what the leading barriers were for success of social software initiatives. Top three were: (1) Lack of understanding for their financial return; (2) Company culture; (3) Insufficient incentives to adopt or experiment with the tools.

5. Facebook Co-Founder Leaves to Start an Enterprise 2.0 Company

Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and colleague Justin Rosenstein announced they were leaving the hot consumer social network to start a new company. The new company will “build an extensible enterprise productivity suite,” with the goal of “making companies themselves run better.” Why would these young guys, sitting on top of the leader in consumer social networking, choose to exit? As I wrote at the time:

The Enterprise 2.0 market is still quite nascent and fragmented. Combine that industry profile with projected spending in the category, and suddenly you understand why these guys are striking out on their own.

Assuming they’ll be able to tap the mother ship for help, I think this was a fairly important story this year.

6. Microblogging Enters the Enterprise

Joining wikis, blogs, social bookmarking and other incumbent tools this year was microblogging . Given the way Twitter is used by Enterprise 2.0 aficionados, and is enjoying skyrocketing popularity, it’s no surprise we started seeing microblogging emerge for internal use. At the mostly consumer-focused TechCrunch50, enterprise microblogging start-up Yammer won the top prize. Other start-ups in the category include SocialCast and Present.ly. SocialText added microblogging with its release of Signals.

7. Gartner Narrows its Criteria for Social Software

Gartner came out with its Social Software Magic Quadrant in October. As SageCircle notes:

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant is probably the iconic piece of analyst research. With its visibility and status, it also has enormous influence on vendor sales opportunities, especially when it comes time for IT buyers to draw up the all-important vendor short lists.

The effect of that is to establish those two tools as the de facto standard for enterprise social software inside the enterprise. To the extent corporate buyers are listening to Gartner for signals about the market, this will make it a bit more challenging for start-ups with interesting offerings that address other parts of the social software market. Yammer, for instance, won’t make it into their Magic Quadrant.

8. Enterprise RSS Fails to Take Off

RSS is one of those technologies that you know has huge value, and yet continues to struggle for awareness and adoption. Google tracks the leading “what is” searches. The fifth most popular on its list? “What is RSS?” Take that as both good and bad. Good that people want to know, bad that awareness continues to be a struggle.

Forrester analyst Oliver Young has a sharp write-up that shows enterprise RSS did not expand inside companies as many had thought it would this year. As he notes:

Of the three enterprise RSS vendors selling into this space at the start of 2008: KnowNow went out of business completely; NewsGator shifted focus and now leads with its Social Sites for SharePoint offering, while its Enterprise Server catches much less attention; and Attensa has been very quiet this year.

RSS is a great way to distribute content inside companies, but its ongoing limited adoption was a big non-story for the year.

9. IBM and Intel Issue Employee Social Media Guidelines

IBM and Intel each established guidelines for their employees who participate in social media. As I wrote, this essentially was a deputization of employees as brand managers out on the web. These market leaders were essentially saying, “have at it out there on blogs, social networks, Twitter, etc. But make sure you know the company’s expectations.” These guidelines represent a milestone in large enterprises’ comfort with social media. I expect we’ll see more of this in 2009.

10. The Recession

This affects all industries, globally, of course. And Enterprise 2.0 is no exception. Jive Software made news with its layoffs, but the effect was industry-wide. And of course, corporate buyers aren’t immune either. It’s a time for companies to hunker down, get slimmer, more focused and creative than they are in flush times. This recession will be a marvelous test for the resiliency of the Enterprise 2.0 sector.

Those are my ten. Did I miss a big story for 2008? Add your thoughts in the comments.

If you’re interested in tracking what happens in 2009, I encourage you to join the Enterprise 2.0 Room on FriendFeed. It is a centralized location for tweets and Del.icio.us bookmarks that specifically relate to Enterprise 2.0.

By Hutch Carpenter

CRM 2.0: Fantasy or Reality?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:37:00 +0000

The rise of Social Computing means that customer relationship management (CRM) professionals must find innovative new ways to cope with the emerging phenomenon of "social customers." Forrester Research talked to early-adopter companies and leading CRM vendors as part of its research into CRM 2.0 strategies to understand the business tactics and the technologies involved.

Principal analyst William Band says customers are demanding that enterprises engage with them in new, more "social" ways. The technologies needed to support CRM 2.0 strategies are maturing, and early adopters are already gaining competitive advantage by forging new and tighter relationships with their buyer communities.

Key CRM 2.0 objectives include: Listening, the on-going monitoring of customers conversations with each other; Talking, participating in and stimulating two-way conversations customers have with each other; Energizing, making it possible for enthusiastic customers to help sell or make introductions to each other; Supporting, enabling your customers to support each other; and Embracing, helping customers work with each other to come up with ideas to improve products and services.

So how do you take the CRM 2.0 plunge? Band offers these recommendations:

Initiate CRM 2.0 experiments immediately. Define a near-term opportunity to apply CRM 2.0 ideas to a customer-facing challenge at your company. Build some practical experience that will break you out of out of old mindsets. Refine your strategies later as new learnings emerge. Ten years ago, Electronic Arts recognized it could not cope with the anticipated tenfold increase in customer support inquiries as the result of launching large-scale online multiplayer games. There were no commercial solutions to help at the time, so it began experimenting and developing its own solutions. Trying new ideas and discarding the old, EA actively worked to gain matter-of-fact experience by actively participating in the "virtual worlds" of its social game players.

Benchmark customer and prospect social readiness. Survey your customers to assess their Social Computing behavior and attitudes. Use Forrester's Social Technographics® as a framework for assessing whether prospects and customers are willing to comment on blogs, contribute content to online forums or wikis, or view online video segments.

Define your social customer objectives. The most important decision is not what technology to use; most important is determining who you're trying to reach, what you're trying to accomplish, and how you plan to change your relationships with your customers. At Forrester, we advocate using a systematic, four-step method for next-generation customer management strategy formation. The acronym for the four steps is POST: people, objectives, strategy, and technology.
Assess your CRM 2.0 capabilities. Undertake a self-assessment to understand how your organization stacks up compared to CRM 2.0 best practices and identify where you should focus your attention for quick wins.

Understand the social computing solutions landscape. You must learn to navigate an emerging CRM solutions landscape that includes both traditional solutions and new Social Computing capabilities.

Map out your social CRM capabilities-building plan. A CRM 2.0 plan should be tightly linked to business goals, focused on customer benefits, clearly identify the processes and constituencies that will be affected, and specify the associated information and capabilities required.
Define your metrics for success. Exceptional discipline is what sets CRM winners apart from failures. CRM 2.0 comprises both a strategy and a set of tools, but you also need to pay attention to how well you are tracking toward your goals over the long term. Establishing the right metrics is part of the discipline that leads to success.

Social technology adoption has increased tremendously during the past 12 months. Three in four U.S. online adults now use social tools to connect with each other compared with 56% in 2007. Leading CRM vendors are adding collaborative capabilities to augment the transactional business processes of marketing, sales, service, and product/service development. These technology and social changes are transforming the way all businesses operate, create products, and relate to customers.

Early adopters are already experimenting, gaining experience, and achieving early successes adopting the concepts and solutions that comprise CRM 2.0. This is not fantasy, it is a reality.
To download a complimentary copy of this report, please visit.

by CIO Zone

Will Enterprise 2.0 ever enter big organizations?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:34:00 +0000

I have been reflecting lately on how Enterprise 2.0’s experimentations could be introduced in a big organization environment. There is a lot of “change management” thinking there for sure: start small, pick quick wins, build a community of supporters,… But it seems that there is also more profound forces involved as well: Enterprise 2.0 represents a real paradigm shift for process oriented organizations.

I hate to use the term “paradigm shift”, because it has been used so many times, and for quite common situations. But in this case, I’m starting to wonder if there is not indeed a very distinctive approach between the two modes that would require organization to adopt very different ways to think about their internal dynamics.

Let me first give a bit more background on what I mean by process oriented. It is obvious that many big organizations, if not all of them, conceive their production of value (be it an actual product or a service) as a succession of tasks performed by different individual in specific roles. In this approach, the actual individual fulfilling a role is quite irrelevant as long as he or she has the capacity to perform the corresponding operations. The greatness of such a design is that it tends to make production fairly predictable. The downside is that you can not use the complete value of every individual in your organization because you ask them first to fulfill roles and you miss everything they can do outside of this specific role. Plus there is also a natural tendency to accumulate slack: if you use 100% of the time of an individual in a particular role, you create a bigger uncertainty than if you ask him to operate at 70%, plus or minus a couple of percents; and thus, you become less predictable.

On the contrary, if you loosely define Enterprise 2.0 as the adoption in a production context of collaboration modes as found on the Web, you end up with a very different picture. The individuals and their abilities are at the center of this picture. People freely decide to which project they will contribute and on which part. The whole dynamic is anything but predictable. It is on the contrary very efficient to perform many projects at the same time but with no coordination of a central authority that would ex ante define which one are really worth pursuing. Projects happen not because they are dimmed important by a couple of executive roles, but because the necessary skills aggregate through the desire of each participant of contributing. You trade predictibility for an incredible speed of implementation.

Now imagine a big organization that has been defining and refining its internal processes for the past decades. That has established its recruitment and dismissal processes to constantly have a sufficient stock of resources to fill the different roles.

Imagine that you ask it to conceive itself as an internal market where resources can freely recombine to pursue emerging projects. That you promote the notion that you will, through this, greatly augment the output by loosing control on the nature of this output. Did I mention the term “paradigm shift”?

by Frederic Baud

19 Aralık Günü Dersimizin Konuğu: Alemşah Öztürk

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 21:37:00 +0000

Konu: "Viral Marketing, Story Telling, WOMM"

Konuşan(lar):

1) Alemşah Öztürk
2) Yüce Zerey

Dijital Pazarlama ALEMlerinin ŞAH'ı Alemşah Öztürk, bu hafta bizlere Viral Marketing, Story Telling, WOMM anlatacak. İnsanların damaklarında vazgeçilmez bir tat bırakan katma değerli sunumları, ses getiren ödüllü projeleri ile tanınan başarı insanı Alemşah'ı dinlemek için ben 19 Aralık Cuma günü Bilgi Üniversitesi Santral Kampüsü'ndeyim.

Peki ya siz?

Hala Alemsah kim diyenleriniz var ise, buyurun buradan:

"Alemşah Öztürk , internet Türkiye'ye geldiğinden beri bu alanda çalışıyor. 96' dan bu yana sektöre emek veren Öztürk, 2000'li yıllarda Türkiye'nin birçok interaktif ajansında Kreatif Direktörlük, yöneticilik yaptı. Uluslararası birçok başarılı projeye imza atan Öztürk, sonrasında işin marketing ve reklam tarafına da kafa yormak ve kendini geliştirmek için reklam sektöründe de çalıştı. 41? 29! adlı interaktif pazarlama ajansını kurmadan önce, Manajans JWT'da Deneyim pazarlama direktoru olarak çalıştı. 41? 29! ile beraber sektöre taze bir kan katan, farklı ödüllü projelere imza atan Öztürk, aynı zamanda başarılı bir konuşmacıdır ve Online Marketing konusunda başta Marketingist, MediaCat Workshop’ları, ve interaktif pazarlama zirveleri olmak üzere bir çok workshop, seminer ve sunum yapmıştır. Boş vakitlerinde Trendsetter dergisiyle, illustrasyonla ve bonsai ağaçlarıyla ilgilenmektedir."

Enterprise 2.0 Ready For Primetime?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:17:00 +0000

Enterprise 2.0 Ready For Primetime?

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: wikis rss)

The relevance of Enterprise 2.0 in an economic downturn

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 16:45:00 +0000

Moving towards our Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum 2009, a key issue has to be how these themes are relevant to the most prominent concerns of senior executives. In short, how will applying Web 2.0 and mobile technologies in organizations save money, increase efficiency and productivity, increase market share, and build profitability?

A number of recent blog posts have squarely addressed this issue, and are important reading in framing why Enterprise 2.0 must be a top priority for executives.
Susan Scrupski, talks about Reality Check 2.0 in writing about what the members of the Advisory Board for the next Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston are saying.
Mike Gotta of Burton Group says:

Some of the phrases I keep hearing:
1. Efficiency (cost containment/avoidance, streamlining, etc.)
2. Execution (all-things-lean, process refinement)
3. Effectiveness (process and people performance, measurable productivity)
4. Rationalization (of budgets, of projects, of platforms)
5. Governance and metrics to support the above. Operations (run the business) and investment to protect top/bottom line engines (grow the business) are still ok – transformation unless it maps into some of the above areas is more discretionary – a good strategist will not cut to the bone… but overall – it’s a run/grow the business more than transformation.…some savvy execs will keep a portfolio perspective and still invest in some long-term areas and not slash things to the point that when the economy rights itself they are strategically behind but they (1) may not have any choice and (2) may not get broad agreement from their peers.

I absolutely agree that the first five points are fundamental to management today, and are what are top of mind for most executives. However I disagree that transformation is or should be discretionary. Mike also makes the point that even “savvy” executives are tightly bound by market and organizational constraints. Certainly short-term survival is paramount, but beyond survival, transformation is not an option.

Over the last month or two I have repeatedly stated in media interviews and keynotes my belief that the next year or two will bring a greater shift in economic structure than probably any other time in history. A sharp downturn combined with technology-accelerated shifts in industry structure will see a rapid rise in differentiation in company fortunes. The trajectories of winners and losers will become more pronounced than ever. As such, it is an imperative to transform organizations to take advantage of those shifts.

When I spoke at a recent strategy session for a leading technology company, they said some of my ideas could have been taken straight from their playbook. For vendors, it is essential to distinguish between those companies that are simply focused on cutting and sticking with the status quo, and those that recognize the possibility and importance of shifting how they work. Ignore the former and focus on the latter.

Building on this theme, Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School, who spoke at our inaugural Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum in February 2008, has written an outstanding post titled The Enterprise 2.0 Recovery Plan on what he would do if he were put in charge of IT at one of the struggling US auto makers. He lays out a high-level plan, guided by the following principles:

• The company 'knows' the answers to our questions.
• Most people want to be helpful to each other, and to the company.
• Expertise is emergent.
• People are busy.
• Weak ties are strong.
• The ability to convert potential ties into actual ones is valuable.
• Platforms are better than channels.
• Search is the dominant navigation paradigm.
• The mechanisms of emergence should be encouraged.
• Anyone can learn the new tools, but they need to be educated, trained, and encouraged.

Andrew goes on to say

“I'm confident that the biggest and fastest bang for the IT buck at a US automaker today comes from Emergent Social Software Platforms and Enterprise 2.0.”

Which goes to another critical point: Enterprise 2.0, implemented intelligently, can not only increase worker productivity and efficiency, it can also significantly cut IT costs. While executives are afraid of new technology initiatives because they think automatically think that significant investment is required, in fact very low cost platforms can potentially replace current very expensive platforms and services.

The topic of how emerging web and mobile technologies are relevant to the most pressing concerns of the corporate world merits – and will receive – substantial attention in the period ahead. This will be a key theme at Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum.

By Ross Dawson

How to maximize collective intelligence

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 15:35:00 +0000

How to maximize collective intelligence

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: portal weblogic)

Enterprise 2.0 and Innovation

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 17:34:00 +0000

Enterprise 2.0 and Innovation

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: enterprise 2.0 collaboration)

The Enterprise 2.0 Manifesto (making the case for the open organization)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 17:21:00 +0000

I also gave this it’s own page so that it persists as a top level item…

The Enterprise 2.0 Manifesto (making the case for the open organization)

0.verview

The death of the mass-produced product for the mass-market is widely documented. The need for extraordinary customer service widely understood. We can make the kinds of organization and communication that work for individual’s passions, interests and convenience.

Changing how companies and individuals interact and work together has been talked about for years. The organization must stop being apart from customers and include customers and employees directly in business activity (also in strategy formation and product roadmaps).

Every customer should be able to engage however they want to, with whomever they want to, and so can every person in every company. Interactions are between individuals having honest conversation - there isn’t really room for the official party line and big pronouncements.

Big changes:

Customers are the company
Organizations do not communicate, people do
Trust depends on an ongoing dialogue
Customers are experts on themselves
Engaging involves doing; it is more than just talking
Sharing control is inevitable for the long term success of companies
Procedures are less important than people (outside factories)

1. Customers are the company

Companies that work more closely with customers will have more relevant products and have greater success. The strong dividing line between company and customer will become less distinct.

Organizations and customers need to be jointly involved in the things that matter, like strategy, direction, operations, and future product development of the company (Is there anything else you do that customers should not be involved in? Why?)

Customers want to form long term relationships with several individuals inside the organization, and ensure that the company will continue to be relevant to them tomorrow, ensuring future benefits from existing investments.

We are not simply talking about an extranet with a blog, forums, and some online support, this goes to the core of operational attitude. A real-life honest communication between customers and employees about things that matter and the availability of tools that let customers get involved with decision making, the ability to question and to challenge, and directly influence the company.

What specifically happens:

Customers and employees share the same information
Customers and employees understand and directly impact company strategy
Customers and employees have a direct say in products and features
Customers and employees point out where a company is not walking the talk and it gets fixed quickly.

Customers need to be involved “in the flow” of every business, and to self-serve at every opportunity.

2. Organizations do not communicate, people do

Individuals want to communicate directly with the person that knows facts, and receive it unfiltered. Everybody should be able to communicate with the most relevant person to get the information that they need.

Connecting is straightforward - the company needs to get out the way of individual communication - and let people get on with doing it for themselves. The challenge is getting the communication into the core of activity, rather than just extra information outside of the flow.

Customers might like to…

Have a guest post on your extranet,
Start a forum.
What about live chat… …directly with the developer who wrote the code?
And access to my documents about my projects. even the ones that I wouldn’t normally see.
How about letting customers directly update facts themselves?
Add a comment to the official documentation for review, update some parts of it
Have the same information as the person on the other end of the telephone, before calling
Can I have an RSS feed of my updates please?
Suggest a new product feature
Tell you how they want to work with you next year
Assist other customers with your product
Tell you what they want to do that is not on the above list

Whatever the means of communication, it needs to happen. If you are not talking, you are not listening.

This extends beyond simple conversations into things that directly and materially affect products, services, and what the people in the company do on a daily basis. Information behind he firewall has less value than that shared with customers.

3. Trust depends on an ongoing dialogue

Ongoing open dialogue shifts allows for long term trust. New customers can see how you work with existing customers. Existing customers can share your successful history with new customers, and point out issues that get fixed quickly for everyone’s benefit.

Placing value in the long term relationship means that nobody is just this quarter’s sales target. It seems obvious, and you have to pay-it-forward. We can have a conversation based on who we are and our aspirations - what are we going to achieve.

Staff retention, and repeat custom are obvious benefits, as is having a soul. And a sense of humor and personality.

Beyond community and chatter there is a commitment to ongoing engagement in the core business activity. Building a reputation for reliably listening and doing is a matter of trust.

Companies should be able to say

This is how we have paid attention to what customers wanted in the product
This is a change we made to how we work to satisfy this customer,
This is what we will do for you

4. Customers are experts on themselves

There is no “the market”. The market is a chaotic collection of customer organizations and employees all know what they want, individually. The skill of a company is delivering solutions that satisfy the highest number of wants by getting to the patterns, and making decisions that lead to satisfied individual customers.

We need to talk directly and honestly. Sure we also need the tools to find the patterns, aggregate, and prioritize (difficult, because prioritizing is deciding what to not do). Individual connection means that we work together to deliver more value.

Surveys and market research and aggregated data, and MIS, and analytics are all useful, though less than communicating directly. Providing the tools that allow customers to influence actions means that action can be based on real wants identified by experts.

Co-creating new products, improving existing products, tuning operations and sharing strategy with customers means less guessing, and more exact-fit.

5. Engaging involves doing; it is more than just talking

Adding substantial value involves introducing the appropriate tools, committing to take action on customer and employee wants, and being honest. We need a common understanding of things that people feel passionate about, the things that they will drive through, and tell their friends about, and help each other to use.

This is difficult, worthwhile work. We expect power distribution curves and adoption difficulties. We expect it to take a while, and we expect to continually modify our tools and methods until we get it right.

6. Sharing control is inevitable for the long term success of companies

Sharing control means giving more of a voice to customers, and then acting. Acting on customer wants using real information beats guesswork. A competitive advantage exists for every company that is able to communicate with customers better. Getting the right product to market quickly, and fewer wrong guesses.

This is shared control, and pushes inwardly as well towards employees as well as customers causing real direct change inside the business, towards honesty from command and control, as well as being open to the possibility that the crowd knows better. You could be wrong now rather than having to wait until later - you don’t have to wait for the results of the survey, or anything else.

This also means that everybody has to be available to serve the customer better. If the easiest way to get this change made is for Bob to do it, we need to get Bob involved now.

7. Procedures are less important than people

In many environments procedures are a straightjacket that constrain individuals from acting in the customers best interest (submit for approval, all documents go through marketing). Knowledge workers are hired for their brains. Let them be applied for better serving customer wants.

Factories and high volume activities demand processes to ensure consistency, and where they add value to the product and customer obviously assist. We need to trust employees and customers to point out where these processes can be improved. “That is just how we work” is usually an incorrect answer.

If we can do something better then we should. If it involves circumventing broken processes and is in the customer interest great, and better still is fixing the broken procedure.

Where a procedure exists it must be the easiest and best way of doing something, and not a stick or constraint, or guideline for reigning people in.

Summary

It is fashionable to put 2.0 at the end of everything where a greater level of individualism and conversation takes place. The concepts of empowerment, engagement and providing the tools for better working are key. We don’t really mind what you call it.

Open organizations, open innovation, Enterprise2.0 - the conclusion is the same:

Giving individuals the ability to engage easily in sharing passions and interests leads to better work environments, better products and service, and a better sense of being. The individual is at the centre of these new ways of working and that should be in the workplace as well as in our personal lives.

By bretthusbands

The Auto Industry and Enterprise 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 17:20:00 +0000

A recent post from Andrew McAfee, the Harvard professor who coined the term “Enterprise 2.0,” speculated on what he would do to turn around an auto company in which the new management “will fund and fully support whatever initiatives I propose.” As someone who spent 23 years in the auto industry, the last ten of which were in developing and deploying collaborative technologies, and having been involved in the Enterprise 2.0 industry for several years, I feel compelled to respond.

It may be fruitless to comment on advice that is based on a “complete fantasy” (McAfee’s words, not mine). But, McAfee is an influential figure and many reading his post will certainly take it as practical advice for the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 in large companies. It is not.

If you are looking for principles of Enterprise 2.0 solutions then McAfee’s post is a reasonable starting point. However, if you are looking for advice on Enterprise 2.0 adoption within large companies then McAfee’s advice falls well short.

To summarize McAfee’s advice:

“I’d roll out as quickly as possible a single integrated suite of emergent social software platforms (ESSPs) to all employees of the company.” (he also provides a set of requirements for this platform)
Make the use of these tools mandatory. He would accomplish this “by announcing on the 'go live' date of the new E2.0 suite that participation will become part (10-20%?) of everyone's performance evaluation, starting in six months.”
He would start an internal blog of his own.
He would “work to create an environment in which people feel safe and free to speak the truth".”
Deploy a prediction market to learn which projects will be late, predict sales volumes of new vehicles, and speculate on what moves competitors are making.

I can’t argue with starting your own internal blog and I kind of like the idea of using prediction markets in large companies. But, it’s McAfee’s first two pieces of advice that are unrealistic in non-fantasy situations. Other critical pieces are missing as well.

So please allow me to follow in McAfee’s footstep and tell you what I would do if I were the new CIO in this fantasy.

In the short-term I would learn of and support current Enterprise 2.0 efforts going on within the company, whether they were company-sponsored or not.

Find the people in the company who are using and promoting the use of Enterprise 2.0 solutions. Perhaps this could be the topic of my first post on an internal blog (but, at least for this one, I’d send an e-mail message too). Although I think McAfee overstates the amount of experience the average person has with these tools (especially their application within enterprise situations) there is likely some people already promoting their use. Most importantly, I would look both inside and outside of IT for these champions of change.
I would then listen to what these people are doing, learn what has worked, and what challenges they are facing. Of course, we would form a community within the company to share our experiences and support each other.
Given the dire situation, these could be the people most likely to be axed. They need to be protected, supported, and eventually given the resources they need to be successful.
The Enterprise 2.0 solutions most likely to make the biggest difference will come from this community. Best of all, they will give me a head start and build credibility.

Longer-term I would:

Look for opportunities to leverage Enterprise 2.0 solutions that stand the best chance of success and plan how to develop this as a capability others can use. Stories sell change. We need stories, fast.
The best opportunities integrate Enterprise 2.0 solutions within the natural flow of work (as McAfee says). This may mean focusing on technologies that are less commonly used among consumers but are more appropriate for enterprise use. The community we formed when I first became CIO will help figure this out.
My first priority is getting something that can make a difference and is easily understood. A platform approach is something to strive for but won’t matter if these initiatives fail. Applications sell change, not platforms.
Most importantly, the CIO needs to build a strong relationship with other senior executives in the company. This is necessary to get their buy-in on an appropriate IT governance structure that can ensure a coordinated effort between both the business and IT sides of the company. Grass-roots adoption works (I’ve seen it and creative governance structures can allow that to happen within reasonable limits) but the home runs that make a difference also require top-down management support to ensure change gets baked into every day work processes.

In short,McAfee falls into a classic “White Knight” trap by assuming no one in the auto companies is familiar with emerging concepts like Enterprise 2.0 or has tried to implement this or similar types of change before. He also ignores the tough adoption issues that cannot be solved through mandates or technology alone.

By Larry Cannell

A new business indicator for enterprise 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 11:17:00 +0000

Traditional business is usually a vertical one: companies buy raw material, assemble them, and create products and / or services which they deliver to customers. Even Google, one of the most recent powerful enterprise, is following this model : Google buys computers, adds an algorithm, and deliver a set of services (this is of course a simplified vision, but not a wrong one). The innovation of Google relies in its business model: the core service (the search engine) is free, while the peripheral service (advertisment) is paid. But it is not a paradigme shift.

However, there are some interesting little signals of traditional industries moving from this vertical model to another one: an enterprise who manages a market place. Here are a few exemples.

A traditional auctioner sells goods to people. Ebay creates a world wide community of people who trade together.
A traditional bank loans money coming from its suppliers to their customer. LendingClub, like many other social lending companies (Prosper, virginmoney, zopa, ppdai, dhanax, fynanz, etc..) creates a marketplace where people loan to other people.
A traditional major record musics from artists, and delivers it to customers. Sellaband, like many other sites (SliceThePie, spidart, indiegogo, etc…), creates a platform for people to invest into music, or film, and get revenus on the sale of the album, or the movie.
A traditionel telecommunication operator buys products to create a network infrastructure to sell minutes, or bandwidth, to customers. Fon creates a marketplace where people do exchange their Internet access.

The underlying business is not yet huge. The social lending market was 647M dollars in the US in 2007. Not big, but it was 269M in 2006; a very good progress. Could this move amplify ? Well, there is no reason it could not, except if traditional businesses, or the regulator (when not the two..) fights againts this; the social lending space has been recently shaked: Zopa is closed in the US, Prosper halts operations, all because of non compliance to SEC regulation. Only LendingClub resists so far.

But I still believe that this move may generalize. I recently discussed with a retail brand who sells food products in many shops over the country. The trend is there: customers want fresh products coming from less than 100 miles away. Well, what happens if, economic crisis helping, people start producing fruits, vegetables, in their own gardens. What happens if the retailers becomes an intermediate between, on one side, his customers-consumers, on the other side, his customer-producers ? He then starts a local market place…

Therefore, I would propose to work on a new economic indicator of a “Enterprise 2.0″ : the ratio of the horizontal money which flows between customers, to the revenue of the company. This indicator shows how many dollars are exchanged between customers in the marketplace for one dollar of revenue.

There is a case where this indicator can be easily computed: when a company earns a percentage of a transaction, the indicator is the reverse of the percentage. If we assume that ebay is a company which earns 2,5% as an average, the ratio is 40.

Linden Lab is another interesting company: if we assume that it generated 40 M dollars of revenu in 2007 (my guess after talking to them), and if we assume the SLifers exchanged 400 Millions dollars, the ratio is 10. Not bad.

On the other side of the scale, a traditional telecommunication operator, though delivering a service which is personal communication between people, is totally unable to generate any financial flux between his customers. I once proposed to a telco to create marketplaces where customers could exchange SMS, or even trade phone minutes. The answer was “are you crazy? We do not want to see a decrease in our revenues”. For telcos, the ratio is zero…

Interestingly, in traditional business, companies who already do trading between customers want a high percentage, therefore a low ratio.

The indicator I propose does not mean a low percentage, but rather the capacity to create a dynamic marketplace between customers.

It is a totally new approach.

By Chez Serge

The Enterprise 2.0 Recovery Plan

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 17:51:00 +0000

Recent events in the news have inspired a thought experiment: I asked myself what I would do if I were put in charge of IT as part of the turnaround effort at a big US automaker. To be a bit more specific, I imagined that one of the big 3 American auto companies was taken over tomorrow by enlightened and aggressive new leadership whose only goals are to restore the company to operational and financial excellence. This leadership is enlightened (in my book) because it believes firmly in the power of IT to help businesses achieve their goals and differentiate themselves in the marketplace, and will fund and fully support whatever initiatives I propose (this is a complete fantasy for several reasons, but thought experiments aren't supposed to be constrained by reality.).

So what would I propose?

I'd be guided by a couple facts and a few principles. The first fact is that on day one I would know virtually nothing about the company's IT environment. I wouldn't know, for example, what major enterprise systems needed to be deployed, integrated, consolidated, upgraded, etc. I also wouldn't know about the health, status, and importance of the large projects currently underway. I'd set about trying to learn answers to these questions, of course, but this would be a long, slow process.

My colleagues on the new management team would be similarly in the dark on day one about other critical questions:

Which of our current vehicle platforms under development will be hits in the market? Which will be duds?
Are our current platform projects largely on schedule, or are they falling badly behind?
Where are our biggest opportunities to cut costs without losing valuable capabilities?

The second fact (actually more of a very safe bet) is that the company would have a static and fragmented Intranet, and that employees would communicate with each other primarily via email. In other words, Enterprise 2.0 would not be advanced within the company, nor would it be universal.

As I got to work and tried to deliver results and benefits as quickly as possible, I'd be guided by a set of principles, many of which I've discussed in this blog:

The company 'knows' the answers to our questions. The knowledge required to answer them exists within the workforce. This knowledge is widely diffused, constantly changing, and not contained in the mind of any single person (As Friedrich Hayek pointed out many years ago), but it is out there. Most executives, I'm pretty sure, believe this to be true. What's frustrating them is that they don't have great ways to collect and access this knowledge.
Most people want to be helpful to each other, and to the company. I think it's self-evident that people are largely good; if we weren't, we would have wiped each other long before now. And we are to some extent wired for altruism and reciprocity. Finally, American carmaker employees have ample reason to fear for their industry, their company, and their jobs, so they have extra incentive to pitch in and help out, and to experiment with new ways to do so.
Expertise is emergent. It's logical and natural to think that all the good new product ideas come out of the design department and R&D labs, that the folk in the IT department are the best ones to help you with your computer problem, and that the engineers are the only ones who can figure out why the doors start rattling after 5,000 miles on the road. But this is not always going to be the case. The more we look, the more we see that a very effective way to solve a problem is to expose it to a highly diverse set of potential problem solvers, then let them have at it.
People are busy. Most knowledge workers have more than enough to do with their normal jobs, and aren't going to go too far out of their way too often, even though they do want to be helpful. This implies that any new tools need to be perceived as 'in the flow' of work, rather than 'above the flow.' There are a few ways to achieve this. One is to make the new tools extremely simple, easy, and intuitive to use, and to ensure that they're never more than a couple clicks away. Another is to 'widen the flow' so that job descriptions include 'enterprise-level helpfulness / collaboration.' A series of three posts advocating this is here, here, and here.
Weak ties are strong. Weak-tie networks are great places to look for novel information and introductions to valuable people. And social networking software (SNS) is a great tool for building, maintaining, and exploiting networks of weak ties. Instead of being a time-waster, enterprise SNS would be a powerful resource.
The ability to convert potential ties into actual ones is valuable. At present we rely primarily on human brokers and connectors to introduce us to valuable colleagues. These organizational matchmakers are extremely valuable and influential, and there aren't nearly enough of them.
Platforms are better than channels , for a lot of reasons. Channels like email hide information; platforms like blogs, wikis, Facebook, and Twitter make it visible, persistent, and widely consultable.
Search is the dominant navigation paradigm. People navigate online content by typing words into search boxes rather than navigating through menus. This implies that we should do everything we can to make sure search works well.
The mechanisms of emergence should be encouraged. For search to work well, online content needs to be heavily interlinked. So people should be given the ability to link to content they find valuable and encouraged to do so. They should also be encouraged to tag, vote, rate, and to all the other things that help identify what a particular piece of content is about, and how good it is. In addition to this explicit work people also vote on and rate content implicitly as they browse through it.
Anyone can learn the new tools, but they need to be educated, trained, and encouraged. I do think that digital natives use technology differently than us older digital immigrants, but we can learn. The new tools of collaboration don't require any skills beyond point, click, drag, drop, and type. They do require users to adopt a particular philosophy about sharing information and interacting with each other, and this philosophy can seem strange at first. When I first heard about Twitter, for example, I said something like "What on Earth would that be useful for, and who on Earth would ever want to use it?" Now, however, I'm a fairly frequent user, find it a really novel and valuable resource, and think that it has strong potential within the enterprise (here are my blog posts on Twitter, and here's a research report on Enterprise 'microblogging' from Pistachio consulting ).

So what would adherence to these principles lead me to do? I'd roll out as quickly as possible a single integrated suite of emergent social software platforms (ESSPs) to all employees of the company. This suite would include blogs, wikis (including collaborative document production tools like Google Docs), discussion boards, SNS, a microblogging tool like Twitter or Yammer, a tagging utility, prediction markets, ways to vote on good content (a la Digg) and ways to give praise or good karma to particularly helpful colleagues. Lots of vendors both big and small are working to develop such suites; for now, I'm going to assume that a complete one exists.

As I wrote earlier, SNS helps with principle #5 above, and a blogosphere (broadly defined here to include a Twitterverse) helps with #6. And the whole idea of ESSPs supports #7. To put the other principles into practice, I'd insist that:

The tools be trivially easy to use, primarily by copying the look, feel, and user interface of the most popular Web 2.0 resources. Too many ESSPs intended for the enterprise try to reinvent the wheel, and they do so poorly. (helps with principles #4 and #10)
All content is cross-linkable, taggable, and Diggable. (#9 and #3 and #8)
The ESSPs contain some initial content and suggested structure, but that these are modifiable over time. (#4)
There be few initial rules or policy statements beyond 'use your judgment' and 'highlight any behavior you find inappropriate.' (#2)
Most platforms be available company-wide. I'd probably allow only group collaborative document production tools to have limited membership. (#3)
Training on the tools be made mandatory for all employees (#4 and #10)

Of course, I'd also make them as device-independent as possible, and give people the ability to access them from home, the road, etc. Somewhat more controversially, I'd also make E2.0 part of every knowledge worker's job. A series of three blog posts on this topic is here, here, and here, and generated a raft of great comments. I'd introduce this change by announcing on the 'go live' date of the new E2.0 suite that participation will become part (10-20%?) of everyone's performance evaluation, starting in six months.

But what about principle #1 above, that the company knows the answers to the critical questions it's facing? This is perhaps the most important one, yet is not directly addressed above. To start to get answers, I'd set up prediction markets for the biggest projects, both IT and otherwise, within the company, letting people trade on whether they'll be finished on time, nearly on time, or nowhere near on time. These markets would very quickly provide accurate and valuable information. I'd also set up markets to predict sales volumes and competitors' moves.
I'd also start asking questions via my own blog, and listen to the comments and responses I got back. I'd work to create an environment in which people feel safe and free to speak the truth.

How would I know if Enterprise 2.0 was working well over time? The accuracy of prediction markets is easy to assess. It's also easy to conduct surveys and find out if employees like the new tools, and prefer them to previous ways of collaborating. I'd also partner with academics to design and execute research investigating whether various attributes of performance improved after the new tools went in.
But the point of having the trust and commitment of my management colleagues is that I wouldn't need to justify this kind of expenditure. If they're on board with the principles then they're on board with the investment required to put them into practice. And this investment is not huge. I'm pretty sure E2.0 wouldn't cost as much as the typical ERP project at a car company.

I used Twitter to float this idea before writing this post, and a number of people responded that "IT isn't the problem at the car companies!" I totally agree. But technology can be a large part of the cure for what ails them. And I'm confident that the biggest and fastest bang for the IT buck at a US automaker today comes from ESSPs and Enterprise 2.0.

Do you agree? Or do you think there would be better uses for investment dollars and managerial bandwidth after the hypothetical leadership change of my thought experiment? I don't, but I'd love to hear your thoughts and reasoning if you disagree. Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

by Andrew McAfee Associate Professor, Harvard Business School

The emerging case for open business methods

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 17:30:00 +0000

The Internet has been the genesis of countless useful business innovations over the last several decades. These include a globally unified e-mail network, the advent of search engines, the rise of rich user experiences and SaaS, and most recently cloud computing to name but a few. But perhaps one of the most far-reaching innovations was the Internet’s ability to enable the creation and organization of the open source movement, arguably the most important progenitor to most things 2.0 and perhaps eventually to business in general.

The business world of the next decade will look quite different from today and require different values and management styles to match.While open source itself is mostly closely associated with the creation of free software in the Internet age, the associated concepts of open collaboration and open information sharing has roots in the early scientific community, where the (mostly) transparent sharing of ideas and data was the most effective way to enable progress. Related trends such as open data and the Web 2.0 model of open content reflect the now widespread activity of open information sharing and exchange using primarily a commons-based approach, enabled greatly by pervasive world-wide networks such as the Internet.

Given the current size of the Internet, about 1.2 billion people, tapping into and unleashing the enormous productive capacity and latent knowledge at the edge of the network has become one of the most powerful and underutilized economic resources available to businesses today. Accessing this effectively ahead of the competition has been the explicit (though too often unstated) premise of countless Internet startups. It’s turned out that companies with a native “Web DNA” have the best perspective to see the fundamental potential here better than their traditional business counterparts. Most businesses still look at the network mostly as a secondary channel for activities such as value inputs, customer relationships, and worker communication and collaboration and not the most valuable one. This is primarily because they’ve traditionally had more dominant and important channels.

But this is starting to change. Through continuous and very widespread experimentation and endeavor, open models of communication, information, and even the creation of products and services, have emerged as a proven and highly effective way to directly drive business activity in entirely new and powerful ways. It’s largely thanks to things like open standards, open source, and open content (aka user generated content and peer production) which have tremendously challenged and even up-ended the old world models of proprietary formats, commercial software, and traditional media respectively.

All this might seem a familiar story but these methods, still too pent-up in a world of high technology and Internet businesses, have begun to spread beyond their origins in software and content and become an significant avenue of opportunity across all aspects of business, albeit involving both great rewards and significant challenges. Particularly in these trying economic times, open models have begun providing the crucial, raw ingredients for a fresh, new perspective in the way we look at how we operate our businesses.

Enterprise 2.0 is just one good example of the emerging intersection of many of these open trends combining open collaboration where anyone can collaborate with globally visible information sharing. It’s also one of the most immediately appealing models to most businesses since it doesn’t necessarily entail many of the risks and challenges that more external modes of open engagement would require. In other words, businesses today are generally comfortable with achieving objectives with the assistance of 3rd parties in an outsourcing or partnership model, but they are generally not as comfortable with using open sourcing or crowdsourcing to achieve the same objectives.

The reasons organizations are wary of more open and 2.0 models for sourcing work and information are many and varied but it generally boils down to four reasons:

Lack of familiarity. Despite the extensive body of knowledge that has accumulated, particularly in the software and media industries, there is a broad lack of understanding of how open models work for those whose line of business lies outside the technology industry. These include how to start and successfully manage open business methods as well as the various governance, legal, and brand issues that open models involve, to name just a few. While many businesses are in fact evolving and expanding their Internet channel, most executives are not yet tracking how these open methods can potentially generate much greater value for less cost across their organization, something that most businesses would find very attractive right now.
Poor evidence in their industry. Most organizations are medium-to-slow adopters or fast followers, not innovators. Open business methods, despite the evidence in other industries, are still unproven in a number of fields of endeavor. As is the case with open APIs, despite their enormous potential, there requires either an enormous individual success story or general industry consensus before there is broad recognition and uptake. Unfortunately, in the online world, where the world is flat, being a medium-to-slow adopter can prevent you from getting in the game at all. Fast followers do have a good chance however, by learning from the mistakes of early adopters and leveraging their momentum before their network effect is firmly established. Along with the stories below, there is an increasing body of evidence that open business methods work in product development, customer service, marketing, operations, human resources, and fields of all kind from politics, manufacturing, education, law, and many others.
Perceived challenges to ownership, control, and monetization. Earlier this week BusinessWeek published a widely covered article about the ongoing business issues around open source companies. From open source software companies such as to social media firms such as YouTube there is a general perception that the intrinsic nature of the openness of a business model can collapse its economic value while upending them into a morass of legal entanglements and intellectual property issues. Never mind that businesses are historically not inclined to share ownership of their products with the market. It is true that open business strategies are quite different than traditional business models and require a different mindset and set of skills to avoid their most commonplace issues.
Uncertainty on how to leverage successfully. Translating entirely new network-driven business models into a business is certainly a tall order for most of us. Without a pioneering success story to guide us, we are left to having to make all the mistakes and do all the hard work. Open business methods have the potential to have millions of our customers help us create the richest and most dynamic products and services, drive down the costs of production, and increase innovation and diversity, but they currently require investment and experimentation. Regulated industries that have their means of operation locked down are going to have some of the largest challenges. And let’s not forget that innovation isn’t automatically a good thing; one could argue that the financial industry was innovating with complicated new investment products in the 21st century and that it spectacularly backfired.

However, intriguing success stories have begun to emerge recently and organizations large and small are beginning to have success with open business methods. Open platforms are probably one of the oldest and most proven of open business strategies (leading to the success of operating systems, personal computers components, and even the iPod accessory market, to name just a few), most open business strategies are still heavily technology and information centric. Some of the more interested recent stories include the following:

Emerging examples of open business strategies

Google Android. One of the biggest open business initiatives in existence is Google’s Android platform, which has brought the first open source mobile phone platform to market. Google has made most of the code available already and will soon make the entire source for the whole platform available to the world. Dave Bort’s post about the open sourcing of the platform in October is telling, saying “Have a great idea for a new feature? Add it! As an open source project, the best part is that anyone can contribute to Android and influence its direction. And if the platform becomes as ubiquitous as I hope it will, you may end up influencing the future of mobile devices as a whole.” Google is making what most businesses would consider as a tremendous gamble in letting anyone contribute to their mobile phone platform (which is currently in production shipping on devices such as T-Mobile’s G1.) However, Google is an Internet firm first and foremost and understands that giving up a certain amount of control also gives them tremendous benefits including getting participation and ideas from around the world. This open business strategy supports an encirclement and constriction strategy around other smart phones such as the more closed iPhone by allowing dozens and perhaps hundreds of different handsets based on Android to proliferate and flourish.
Open location. The world’s best map data is still the provenance of commercial map making companies, but this has begun to be eroded by open location initiatives such as the excellent OpenStreetMap which is a “free editable map of the whole world” using a wiki-based approach and uses high production value including sophisticated interactive Web interface to let anyone add to and improve the data set, which is entirely licensed with Creative Commons. Initiatives like this will eventually affect the commercial viability of more traditional business models around location. Most location products — such as GPS receivers and online map services such as Google Maps — use data sourced from companies like NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas. These organizations are ripe for disruption unless they too adoption open business strategies that offer more participation, transparency, and richness. Fortunately, they have already begun to realize this and NAVTEQ’s user-powered Map Reporter is an example of the kind of response traditional businesses will have to enable open participation in the development of their products over the network. And open location is a good microcosm of the issues that will start to surface as open methods become more common. Will users ultimately be willing to pay mapping companies to access the data they themselves contributed? Will mapping companies be able to maintain the high rates of monetization they have when more and more of their map data is generated by their customers in free products? These are vitally important questions and can be directly translated to industries of all kinds.
Open innovation. Open innovation strategies such as Dell’s Ideastorm and Innocentive are well-known successful examples of open business methods that allow companies to leverage the knowledge and intelligence on the network in a controlled fashion. When open innovation is applied to product development, I’ve referred to it as Product Development 2.0
Peer production. Beyond specific verticals, the concept of peer production is to use the open network to harness collective intelligence and actively build useful outcomes. Also known as crowdsourcing, peer production has resulted in impressive outcomes such as the well known story around the creation of Linux to lesser known but more commercial compelling stories such as Goldcorp, which made a extensive sets of geological survey data of its properties available to the public over the Internet. They offered rewards to anyone who could analyze the data and then suggest places where gold could be found. The company currently claims that the effort produced 110 targets, 80% of which proved productive, yielding 8 million ounces of gold worth more than $3 billion. Netflix has also offered the popular Netflix Prize to encourage innovators anywhere to submit algorithms for film recommendations. The Netflix Prize leaderboard already shows many participants and some winners, though no Grand Prize winner yet. There are many other examples similar to these. The key point here is that companies are beginning to understand how to use open business methods on the network to directly generate business outcomes. One early lesson learned are that incentives are proving to be key to getting high levels of network engagement. There are many ways to use peer production to generate business outcomes and understanding the tenets of open business methods are essential to leverage them successfully.

More efficiency, richer results, but very different businesses

That open business methods are going to become more commonplace as the methods and successes improve there is increasingly little doubt. The real challenge is in the need for change and transformation; successful businesses are less inclined to go out of the comfort zone and risk their reputation and investment on what seem unproven ideas in their industry. But today’s times are extraordinary and there is a very real need for not only change but accountability.

And one of the very best aspects of open business methods is openness; having transparency and visibility into all parts of a truly open business model and the ability to make sure there are few surprises and true accountability. When everyone can see what everyone else is doing and there are not just double-checks and triple-checks but everyone that wants to can observe, understand, and validate what’s taking place. Radical decentralization and radical transparency go hand in hand with open business methods.

Whether your open business strategy is some internal Enterprise 2.0, crowdsourcing your next product design, or using customer communities to provide customer self-service, the business world of the next decade will look quite different from today and require different values and management styles to match. The future of open business is very likely the future of business in the 21st century itself as the network turns out to be the single most valuable asset to which every business has access.

By Dion Hinchcliffe

Solving Organizational Challenges with Enterprise 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 18:24:00 +0000

Interesting post from Enterprise 2.0 thought leader and academic Andrew McAfee on his prescription for restoring the operational and financial health of the big 3 US automakers. Mcafee imagines himself a newly appointed auto industry IT Director and discusses what he would do to heal his ailing company.His solution is to implement a corporate wide talent networking type program which he calls an "emergent social software platform" or ESSP.

He call for a comprehensive suite to include:

blogs

wikis

discussion boards

social networking service

microblogging

prediction markets

praise and recognition

Why does he recommend this approach? Mcafee suggests that the answers to the company's challenges reside in the minds of the employees dispersed across the organization.

Individuals themselves may not have the best answers but technology can be used to pull together the bits and pieces of employees' knowledge to find the right solutions.

Complicated buzzwords aside, I think it's a great approach. We are already beginning to see this kind of organizational social collaboration at non-troubled companies using talent networking.

There is no reason to believe that it wouldn't work equally well with companies that have greater challenges to solve.There are a few caveats though that Professor Mcafee turned imaginary IT Director should heed:

1) The initiative will not succeed if it's driven by the IT department. Although on the surface it seems like a technology solution, in reality it's a people solution that uses IT. As such, a good strong HR and/or Talent Development department needs to be the one spearheading and nurturing the implementation of the program. I have nothing against IT people but they do not have the appropriate skills and knowledge for this.

2) Because it's a people program, it needs to be nurtured - a lot. Really cool technology with all the requisite components is still just a platform - the "P" in McAfee's ESSP. The more challenging aspect is directing and focusing and shaping the use of the platform to create the end result that the company is seeking, that is actionable solutions. In this case, success is not in the journey, it's in the destination.

3) Beware of information overload. Companies that utilize suggestion and feedback systems often become overwhelmed with the amount of information that they capture. Be prepared to deal with an abundance of both good and bad information.

4) Remember that the Wisdom of Crowds only works when each individual in the group is more likely to be right than wrong. As Cass Sunstein pointed out in When Crowds Aren't Wise, crowd think fails if each individual is more likely to be wrong than right. Therefore, it's important to address the right questions to the right people who have the information to be correct, individually, more often than not. Making decisions based on faulty group think will not help the company succeed.

5) A company like any of the big automakers comes with a lot of baggage. There is a history, a corporate culture, there are long standing policies, long service employees and union contracts. The roll-out of the program will need to be integrated in such a way that does not conflict. The employees need to be enthusiastic about participating. If it's not handled well, they will end up with lots of employee eye-rolling and complaints.Therefore, I suggest the following:The organization should prepare in advance the objectives and specific challenges they wish to solve with the system.

They should identify a team from HR that will work with divisional managers on tailoring the program to meet the objectives. A senior executive should be found to help champion the program.

A methodology should be in place for reviewing the information and separating the wheat from the chaff. An ongoing plan should be made for keeping the program energized. Tools should be available for reporting and analyzing on usage and results.

by Beth N. Carvin

Implementing Enterprise 2.0 In The Real World

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 09:45:00 +0000

Now that the hype of Enterprise 2.0 is starting to settle, it's clear that there are many valuable approaches that can (and should) be put into practice.

Intranet and information managers are busy, however, pulled in many directions by different stakeholders. Resources are limited, and senior management visibility is often low. Most teams do not have the luxury of playing with technology, without some level of accountability.

So what should teams be doing in the real world?

These are my suggestions:

Don't be afraid to experiment. At its foundation, innovation is driven by a spirit of experimentation.

I've long argued that the 'traditional' approaches to intranets (and other enterprise platforms) hasn't been working, so we have everything to gain by trying some different ideas.

Take a 'safe-fail' approach. Enterprise projects are very conservative, moving much more slowly than the wider world.

To increase the pace of change, we need to take a 'safe-fail' approach, allowing a range of ideas to be tried with the expectation that some (perhaps most) will fail. The key is to have these failures to strengthen the strategy, not weaken it.

Have a clear purpose. Enterprise 2.0 is just a means to an end. We need to have clear business goals and end-user benefits driving our projects, beyond fuzzy ideas of 'knowledge sharing' or 'creating a collaborative culture'.

Take it seriously. Don't just 'roll out' a solution and hope for the best. We need to make every effort to have these new approaches succeed, including creating usable tools, and establishing good communications, marketing, training and support.

Make it work now. There is a remarkable consensus on what future directions should be, and how things might look in the longer term. Our projects, however, cannot just plan for the future. If staff don't use our solutions in the short-term, there won't be a long term (for us or our projects).

Match the culture. Technology can, to some degree, change the culture of an organisation. More realistically however, our projects should match the current culture to give the best chances of success. We shouldn't be trying to deploy solutions that staff or the organisation as a whole aren't ready for.

Build on the experiences of others. The early adopters have blazed at least some of the trails ahead, and we should build on their experiences. This allows us to avoid 'reinventing the wheel', or deploying solutions that are founded solely on idealism.

The last point is the perhaps most important. I have no patience for breathless enthusiasm about Enterprise 2.0, divorced from the real-world realities of the organizations that we work in.

Instead, I think it's time to take a more measured and mature approach to Enterprise 2.0, building on past experience and best practices.

For example, we want to establish an 'internal Facebook' within our organizations, but our earlier efforts with 'expertise directories' failed at an appalling rate. What personal motivations amongst our staff are we going to target to obtain success this time around?

We know that in most organizations, personalisation often doesn't work, and 'my sites' will not be used. So why are so many organizations betting their entire strategies on one (or both) of these two approaches?

On the other hand, projects by organizations such as British Airways and Scottrade show us some of the many Enterprise 2.0 approaches that do work in practice.

I think there are many important changes to make, and much success to be found. So let's take a middle road, experimenting with new ideas but focusing on delivering success right now.

by James Robertson

Recession 2.0, Meet Enterprise 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 14:14:00 +0000

This week, the National Bureau of Economic Research declared that the US economy had been in a recession since December 2007. In light of that bit of news, it seems appropriate to run a couple of pieces I had posted over the past year.

I don’t intend to join the gloom-and-doom crowd, because I believe the economy is very diverse and resilient. However, it is an inescapable fact that business growth moves in cycles — up and down.

In the event of a downturn, let’s ponder the role of our hyper-networked space in managing through tougher times. We may have not seen anything like it.

Let me start with this thought: It’s not 1975 anymore. In the recession that stormed through the 1974-75 period, there were massive layoffs. Workers were dismissed from plants and offices, and were lined up at unemployment offices. They were powerless, and cut off from information relevant to their industry, coworkers, and new opportunities. Nor for that matter is it 1981, when the ugly cycle repeated itself, or 1991 and 2001, when more powerless white-collar workers joined the unemployment lines.

In those times, it often didn’t matter how much value employees provided to their organizations, when it came time to slash, they were cast out to the street. Of course, many were hired back within a couple of years as things get better. But in the meantime, there were anxious months — and afterwards, the constant fear of future layoffs.

Workers are no longer those powerless pawns, locked into 9-to-5 routines, subject to the whims of their employers. Instead, they carry around portable skills, portable resources, and portable networks that can be quickly applied and adapted to new environments and situations. As we frequently discuss here at FastForward, the balance of power in organizations has shifted to the end-user.

If the organization thinks it can no longer afford the services and expertise an employee provides, that employee may be able to rapidly shift that expertise and services to another organization.

Now, employees remain connected in real time not only to their co-workers from organizations past and present, but also networks of professionals in their areas of expertise. Opportunities and new ideas for generating opportunities can be quickly shared and acted upon. Blogs, wikis, search engines and the like have transformed our workspaces into one single gigantic virtual workplace. We no longer depend on our coworkers down the hall; we now leverage resources from across the globe.

Many employees simply may not even need a full-time employer anymore. In 1975, the idea of going the entrepreneurial route was not a realistic option for most workers. It took plenty of seed money and visibility to get a new operation going and profitable.
Now, it’s possible to start an innovative new business with virtually little or no investment, employing Web-based resources.

It’s now possible to run an entire business on Web 2.0-based services — from infrastructure to databases to business intelligence and analytics. Many are free, the rest only charge on an incremental per-use basis.

There’s the example of GigaVox Media, a podcasting support company, that invested a grand total of $80 for its first two months in the kind of same robust IT infrastructure that would be available to GM. All the computing power you need is available right from the Web — no investment required. Web 2.0 and Software as a Service may give rise to thousands of new businesses.

Unlike previous economic downturns, many of today’s workers and professionals will not resign themselves to the powerlessness of the unemployment line. Any economic downturn has the potential to be reversed or mitigated by empowered employees or entrepreneurs who will be able to collaborate, share information and knowledge, and quickly respond to and act on new opportunities, thanks to our networked economy.

New technologies and online services may help empower people to forge through lean times with new opportunities, versus becoming victims of the economy — as has been the case in times gone by.

Rob Paterson posted an account of a Yahoo employee who was Twittering his way out the door after being laid off. What better way to communicate your situation — and availability for new opportunities — to the world? Truly astounding, and an incredible , empowering resource.
Enterprise and Web 2.0 approaches may provide new avenues to businesses as well. Forrester’s Josh Bernoff has weighed in with some of his thoughts on how Web 2.0 would prevail through a down economy. “Things are different this time,” he opines. For example, we won’t a repeat of the devastation of the 2001 recession, because this is “not a tech bubble” as it was in 2000-2001. “Technology spending is not irrational,” he points out. Agreed.

Josh adds that social networking platforms will flourish in a down economy, however. While advertising may get cut, marketers will see greater value in blogs and social networks. And the best part is that social applications “can be nearly free (think blogs, Ning.com, facebook pages) and even more sophisticated communities are typically $30K to $200K — a lot cheaper than a significant sized ad campaign.” Plus, being all digital and all, social network-based responses are extremely measurable.

So the social networking platforms will do just fine in the event the economy were to go south for a while — and in fact, may even receive a boost from companies seeking inexpensive channels to their customers. And, as I mentioned previously, end users will have that power in their hands as well.

This past week has provided quite a lesson in the functioning of credit markets, and potential impacts on the economy at large. Will the credit crisis broaden into a deeper recession? Who knows. But, as I’ve said in previous posts, the next economic downturn will be different than ones in the past, thanks to Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.

For one, companies looking to trim expenditures will find Enterprise 2.0-style tools to be compelling solutions. eWeek’s Clint Boulton just explored some of the scenarios we may see in “Recession 2.0,” if it were to come to pass.

For example, there could be more Web conferencing instead of business travel. This was a shift first seen in the 2001 post-dot-bomb downturn.

There would also be more interest in collaborative and cloud computing. “Organizations that are looking to move into new technologies, normally a project that would be put on hold when budgets are tight, can still do small implementations with SAAS, including blogs, wikis and social-networking tools to lower costs.”

One more observation on this. Even if the economy suddenly broke into a growth surge, and money started flowing from all directions, we’ll still see growth in collaborative and cloud applications. Companies recognize that the growing capabilities now offered by Enterprise 2.0 and cloud applications offer a huge competitive advantage, not only because they are low cost, but also because they are flexible, and even more important, open up the information flow between teams, departments, partners, and customers.

We have seen the future, and it is online, it is collaborative, and it is wide open — no matter what the state of the economy.

by Joe McKendrick

5 Aralık Cuma Günü Dersimizin Konuğu Arda Kutsal

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:42:00 +0000

Arda Kutsal'a Dair...

Kadıköy Anadolu Lisesi’nden mezun olduktan sonra Girne Amerikan Üniversitesi’nden Endüstri Mühendisliği lisansını aldı. Takip eden dönemde 1 yıl süren KMI (Kavrakoğlu Management Institute) Executive MBA programını ve sonrasında Bilgi Üniversitesi'nde MBA yüksek lisans eğitimini tamamladı.

Farklı sektörlerdeki firmaların çok çeşitli internet projelerinde yöneticilik görevleri üstlendikten sonra, özel bir üniversitede 2 sene Bilgi İşlem Müdürü olarak görev yaptı.

Uzel Holding Bilgi Sistemleri'nde 2 yıl boyunca proje yönetimi, iş süreçleri ve stratejik yönetim konularında çalıştıkran sonra görevinden ayrılıp Argentum Ventures’da Teknoloji Yatırımları Yöneticisi olarak çalışmaya başladı.

Argentum Ventures’daki görevinden Ağustos 2007’de ayrılarak internet girişimlerine odaklı, strateji, yatırım, ürün ve pazarlama alanlarında danışmanlık ve araştırma hizmetleri sunan Crenvo’yu kurdu.

Halen, Crenvo’nun Genel Müdürü olarak Türkiye’nin önde gelen teknoloji ve internet şirketleriyle çalışmakta ve bunun yanında Webrazzi isimli popüler Web 2.0 blogunda Türkiye ve dünyadaki yeni nesil web girişimlerini analiz ve takip etmektedir.

Sevgili Arda Kutsal ile birlikte Marketing 2.0 üzerine sohbet edeceğiz.

Unleashing Wikinomics

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 09:06:00 +0000

The City of Toronto’s web 2.0 summit is coming to a close this afternoon so I thought I’d take the opportunity to make a few quick observations about what I’ve learned so far. For those who missed it, I’ve also posted my slides from yesterday’s keynote.

Unleasing Wikinomics in the City of Toronto

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: government services)

1. Mass collaboration could change virtually every aspect of government: From the way we deliver services like education and health care to the way we develop policy and engage citizens in democratic decision-making to the way we recruit new talent into government agencies and orchestrate capability in the public service.

2. Toronto has an enormous talent pool with more than 4 million residents in the GTA. That’s a lot of brainpower to apply to the challenges that face this city. Could we make the city the most vibrant, progressive and dynamic urban space on the planet? Yes, but we’ve got much work to do to harness this latent potential. That’s why this summit was a good start.

3. Web 2.0 has enormous promise at all levels of government, but the local applications have the greatest potential to make a real difference in how citizens interact with government. The services offered by local government and the kind of decisions taken in the council chambers impact people’s lives very directly. They shape the quality of the urban experience in Toronto and the evolution of its many neighborhoods. The irony is that engagement at the local level of government is typically low, in large part because the existing consultation mechanisms are slow and cumbersome and exclude the vast majority who may not have time to show up to a council session or a town hall meeting. Web 2.0 can make decision-making around issues such as transportation and urban planning more transparent, and that transparency can bolster our ability to scrutinize our local officials (see They Work For Us). With greater transparency comes greater input, with intuitive online tools for information gathering, brainstorming, and collaborative filtering making the process of contributing less onerous and more productive. The City’s facebook consultation on the Jarvis St. streetscape improvement project (demo’s this morning) is a good start.

4. There is an emerging consensus that one of the best ways to enable government 2.0 innovation is for government to embrace the kind of platform openness that has driven the success of entities like Wikipedia, flickr and Amazon. In other words, government should open up their data and online service applications to enable any individual or third party with the skills and inclination to develop new service innovations. The rationale is simple. Government can’t anticipate how citizens’ needs may change or all of the creative ways in which services could be delivered in the future. So by providing an open platform for innovation they can leverage the talents and insights of a much broader community of co-innovators. Indeed, it’s probably fair to assume that citizens, non-profits and businesses—being generally unconstrained by rigid internal brueaucracies and strict accountabilities—will innovate around the data far faster and more freely than government can. Apps for Democracy in DC and “Show Us a Better Way” are showing us the way forward.

5. The City of Toronto’s website needs a major overhaul. Rather than a static portal for disseminating information to residents and visitors, we need a dynamic platform for citizen engagement and service innovation, using the kind of approach described above. One thing is clear from this meeting: the web 2.0 commmunity in Toronto would gladly get this done quickly — just give them access to the underlying data and services. In other cases, the city could simply piggy back on what the community has already provided, much the way local councils in the UK leverage fixmystreet.com, an application developed by a non-profit called mysociety. As of today, 200,000 people have written to their MP for the first time using mysociety’s tools, over 8,000 potholes and other broken things have been fixed, nearly 9,000,000 signatures have been left on petitions to the Prime Minister. No need for government to reinvent the wheel.

6. More than a better website, we need a new form of participatory urbanism that gives citizens a major role in addressing some of our most pressing challenges–e.g., how do we reduce the city’s carbon footprint, improve local transport, and ensure the city remains an attractive destination for investment and job creation. We need a city-wide talent marketplace and solution exchange where problems citizens can converge around these issues. This participatory urbanism project has become one of my latest favorites.

7. None of this needs to be prohibitively expensive. Technology is the easy part – it’s relatively cheap, quick to install and easy to use. The tough challenges are about changing people, processes and culture in the way things are done in the city’s administration. It will take a combination of grassroots wiki communities growing organically (with enthusiastic participants that demonstrate the benefits) and strong leadership from the mayor and other officials to create an environment where innovation can flourish.

8. Finally there’s a wealth of pathbreaking projects to draw inspiration from. This blog is a good source. Be sure to check out The Collaboration Project, run by my friends at the National Academy of Public Administration.

Feel free to suggest other sources or add your observations about the meeting!

Enterprise 2.0 When Enterprise 1.0 Doesn’t Work

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 14:14:00 +0000

At lunch yesterday, two of my colleagues and I talked about the phrase “Enterprise 2.0″.

I admit that I named my second Google study Google Version 2.0, because I thought the “2.0″ designation was a convenient way of numbering my Google monographs. The “2.0″ label suggested to me that the GOOG had kicked up its efforts a notch between the time I finished The Google Legacy in early 2005 and the September 2007 date of my second Google monograph.

At lunch, I told Don (a Windows and database expert) and Stuart (a master programmer) that I didn’t know what Enterprise 2.0 meant. Furthermore, with Enterprise 1.0 companies in big trouble, I thought that we should be talking about “Enterprise 0.35″ or “Enterprise 0.1″, not some fuzzy wuzzy notion of life after the financial crisis. The crisis is here, getting worse, and likely to persist for the foreseeable future. With a $65 billion in revenue company having a share price of $20, there are some problems in technology land. Beyond technology, there are some challenges for General Motors, Citcorp, and the US budget. The idea of an “Enterprise 2.0″ struck me as interesting.

Different Views of Enterprise 2.0

Don said, “Enterprise 2.0 is a buzzword. We had Web 2.0, which was meaningless. We had Search 2.0 which was silly. Now we have Enterpriser 2.0. This is a marketing play and it suggests that the next version will be better than the present version. Too bad it takes some companies three versions to get something to work the way it is supposed to. I just ignore the term.”

Stuart said, “I think Enterprise 2.0 is shorthand for moving some of the high profile Web functions into a company. I think the young employees and contractors already use these, but now companies want to get control of instant messaging, services like LinkedIn and Facebook, and mashups. I don’t think most of the people using the phrase ‘Enterprise 2.0′ know what it means, but the implication is that the cool Web stuff can help an organization do some things easier is why the terms is being thrown around.”

So, I am uncertain. Don thinks it is marketing baloney. And Stu thinks it is old people trying to tap what young people do without giving the service much thought.

Defining Enterprise 2.0

After lunch, I kept thinking about the phrase “Enterprise 2.0″ and decided to poke around for more information. I navigated to Google and entered the search string “define:”Enterprise 2.0″. Google promptly spit back to me one definition. It was succinct and from an outfit called PandoraSquared. The definition was, “The use of freeform social software within companies.” Well, that didn’t help me, since I don’t know what the heck social software is. It is possible to send messages via email, participate in chat, and offer Web pages that allow users to vote Digg style on certain stories. I guess that stuff is social software. I don’t think I need a buzzword to describe these functions, but I’m an old and addled goose, so what do I know?

To master the different facets of Enterprise 2.0 requires a genius of the caliber of Leonardo da Vinci, the last Renaissance man., Is there an MBA at work in a consulting firm who can carry Leonardo’s intellectual weight? Let me know if you have a candidate in mind.

Well, I probed more deeply and I found a conference focused exclusively on Enterprise 2.0. I want to submit a talk so I can explain that I know about uses of commercial off the shelf technology to help companies make more sales. I understand this approach, but I don’t need to say the words “Enterprise 2.0.”

One of my team found this list of topics that defines Enterprise 2.0. You can learn about the conference where these topics will be discussed here. I think this list is quite useful. To master each of these topics would require a modern day Leonardo da Vinci, the last Renaissance man.

Building an Enterprise Culture
Cloud Computing
Conferencing Applications
Enterprise Blogging
Enterprise Mobility
Enterprise Search
Enterprise Software
Enterprise Software Mash-ups
Information Security
Integrated Collaborative Platforms
Messaging Applications
Microblogging and Emergent Platforms
Mobile Social Software
Online Office Productivity Applications
Presence
Social Networking Applications
Software as a Service
Wikis and Team Collaboration Applications

The conference organizers have gathered together a number of threads, sorted them, and presented themes. In my opinion these themes make it clear that the phrase “Enterprise 2.0″ refers to both technology and management issues of interest to managers.

My Thoughts about This Breakdown of Enterprise 2.0’s Components

As I thought about these topics, several ideas came to mind. Let me capture these before they slip away.

First, several of these topics flag information management issues. For example, the notion of building an enterprise culture reaches beyond a particular technology. The idea is that in today’s organization’s “culture” has changed. In fact, when I think of the “culture” of a company, I recall the fingerprint of specific organizations where I worked as an officer or an employee. For example, at the Courier Journal & Louisville Times Co., one of the leading newspapers in the U.S. for many years, the philosophy of the Bingham family created a specific set of expectations and methods. Barry Bingham, who hired me, asked me what I valued in one of our meetings before I was hired. I told him that I wanted to balance work and family, a task that was, in my opinion, impossible at Booz, Allen & Hamilton in 1980. I recall as if it were yesterday what he told me: “We expect our officers to be involved in the community and spend time with their family. If you have to miss a meeting to participate in a community or family event, that’s is okay here.” I was stunned. At Booz, Allen 60 hour work weeks were the norm. Saturday mornings were spent at the office “catching up”. Sunday was interrupted by telephone calls where other Booz, Allen professionals would “touch” or “reach out”. Family life was secondary to the Booz, Allen commitment. Here was a fellow who told me that I could volunteer to coach a sports team or attend a civic function. That was culture, and I experienced culture shock at the Courier Journal & Louisville Times. When the paper was broken up and sold off in 1986, I was shocked with the culture of Bell+Howell, the outfit that bought the information services unit. Bell+Howell was a financial roll up, and it had the look and feel of an accounting firm, not a company where executives should go to a Boy Scout meeting instead of a departmental technology review. The notion that Enterprise 2.0 should address culture tells me quite a bit about how most conference organizers perceive what potential attendees need and want to know. The only problem for me is that technology cannot replace the values and priorities of the senior manager. After the Courtier Journal & Louisville Times “went away”, the people remained, but the culture of the Binghams was lost. In fact, in retrospect, the culture disappeared the day of the sale in June 1986. No Enterprise 2.0–in fact, to my knowledge no software at this time–software can remediate this type of change.

Second, several of these topics are umbrella technologies or phase change technologies. To me, moving some or all software to a data center “out there” in the network brings us full circle. The mainframe model is alive and well, just given a new name such as Cloud Computing or Software as a Service (SaaS). The idea is that a user doesn’t need the application on a computing device. The computing device connects to the application. If the device fails, the application and probably some or all of the data will reside “out there” on the network. The technologies for cloud computing are not trivial, and it is unlikely that a single individual possesses sufficient knowledge to work as an expert in data center performance optimization and negotiating favorable contracts and Service Level Agreements with telecommunication companies to keep costs under control. These buzzwords “cloud computing” and “Software as a Service” are new disciplines, and few companies have a firm grasp on the upsides and downsides of the different facets of these technologies. The subjects are too big, too fast changing at this time.

Third, a number of these topics that define Enterprise 2.0 are information access and manipulations, not new technology at all. For example, Enterprise Search has been around for decades, and it is not working particularly well. The notion of simplifying search (the Google approach), the toolkit approach (the Microsoft FAST approach), the hosted service (the Blossom way), the business intelligence angle (the Attivio approach), the text mining method (ISYS Search Software), the any device, any time system (the Coveo method) the flexible technology approach (the Exalead way), and the other angles of attack make the topic one of the most complex, expensive, and baffling today. Information manipulation issues surface with content creation and security as well. No one person can master these different facets of information access.

Finally, some of these topics focus on communications. The fact that Internet Protocol handles bits means that any thing that can be represented by zeros and ones can be supported by what most people call “the Internet” This allows old functions to operate in what to many is still a new medium. It is not surprising that as awareness of the Internet has grown, more applications, services, and functions have be transported there. Communications, therefore, is a large part of the “Enterprise 2.0″ space. For example, social software, social networking, collaboration, and conferencing are routine methods of interaction now available within a browser or a browser-like environment. I doubt that one person can implement each of these with equal facility.

Net Net

One important point for me is that I am deeply suspicious of any person or organization who asserts expertise in the subject matter of “Enterprise 2.0″. How can a single individual be an expert in complex topics such as Enterprise Search and in Presence and in Security at the same time? Anyone who makes this assertion is straying into what I think of as hubris; that is, confidence that a bright person or a group of bright people can understand and speak with authority about each of these diverse topics. Anyone can have an opinion. Anyone can assert anything. But disaster may strike when these uninformed, essentially unsupported notions are used by an organization to solve a problem. A mistake can put an organization into significant financial difficulty or a competitive disadvantage.

With regard to search, most search vendors support “social functions” but I think few people have thought deeply about the ramifications of social features and information retrieval in organizations. I am thinking about regulated businesses, organizations engaged in work for government agencies that require certain safeguards, and organizations which may find themselves embroiled in litigation. Email can be exciting, and it is very social in nature. In the eDiscovery process, some people learn how exciting social email can be.

To sum up, I acknowledge that “Enterprise 2.0″ can mature into more than a generality or trendy buzzword. But that point is months, maybe years in the future. Individuals or organizations asserting expertise in these diverse areas are to be viewed with caution, perhaps–dare I say it–suspicion.

Is there an “Enterprise 2.0″ discipline? Let me know. Keep in mind that facts are helpful. Assertions can be amusing, even interesting, but data help me understand quickly.

By Stephen Arnold

Enterprise 2.0 Best Practice

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:24:00 +0000

The success of your online community is highly dependent on member Recognition and Reward.

When you setup a social network for your company, your customers become the primary part of the service.

Their participation in the community is similar to being part of other social networks they normally will use. Recognizing vital contribution impresses on the customer that their views are heard by you the business owner.

Customers are most likely to stay on your network when they are shown their precence is noticed and appreciated by the company. For companies with a large customer-base, you are not likely to know all your customers, but an online collaboration using a social network provides the opportunity for finding high-value contributors.

Contributions made by customers provide key information critical to resolving customer issues. The contribution received has a tendency to adding value to the overall business of the company. Product and service enhancement needs are exposed by contributors within the community. But how best can the community encourage vital contributions?

How can you identify high-value contributions and content? The best way to identify content that bring value to your business will be dependent on the rating system and reputation model that is used by all to rate each contribution made to the community forum.

This way each contributor receives points that accumulate to build a customer reputation with your brand. Customers with high reputation can be complemented for their efforts and participation through a reward program. An effective reward program would encourage continuous participation and keep loyal customers around for a very long time.

Contributions received within a community can be transformed into knowledge assets. As participants reputation model grows within the community more responsibilities may be granted to valued community participants to either recommend solutions that can be utilized or they could be invited to assist in determining which user generated content can be harvested from the within the community into a more structured knowledgebase. Fished out content can then be accessed, analyzed and validated by an in-house team into useful solution information that could be published in the company’s support website.

Discussion forums are used by many companies to trigger communication and knowledge sharing among groups that might otherwise be disconnected. For example, problem escalation can be moved from traditional phone escalation to collaborative forums. Collaborative forum is an open door to having more relevant experts who may not necessarily be part of the support team (but are alerted via topic subscription) or share the same geographies collaborate to resolve an issue. The discussion thread provides the content that can be harvested into a solution article. Participation should not be left unrewarded.

Companies can introduce incentives based on certain variables such as re-use counts of solution, timeliness of solution, to encourage participation.

Jason Hekl highlighted a very interesting point in his Conversational Knowledge pertaining to customer control and authority, read along.

The increasing growth of social media has created new expectations for personalization and flexibility in the way people interact with online content. The quest for anywhere access by users has also led to the incorporation mobile access to contextually relevant information through methods of choosing email subscriptions, RSS feeds, shared bookmarks, and many more social media tools.

Customers would like to be on top of their game if given the chance as such applying granular levels of personalization in collaborative knowledge environments encourages customer participation simply by making desired information more accessible. In customer service scenarios where users are more directed and specific with their objectives, every second saved boosts customer satisfaction with the support experience.

Suggest topics to your users, based on the products they use, and interests they have identified in the past. Save a “My Topics” list for user-initiated discussions and highlight which threads have been updated since the user’s last visit, eliminating the need to manually check the site for new posts.

Allow users assign email alerts to their content subscriptions to enable them receive notifications when new responses are posted. Extend subscriptions across discussion forums and the knowledgebase, and provide users with the flexibility to subscribe by topic, content category, author, and discussion.

Provide custom RSS feeds for each subscription, and for searches containing specific phrases or keywords. Track user participation in the forums and maintain an access history so customers can quickly revisit forums and topics that interested them in the past, and highlight which information has been read, not read, or posted new since the last visit. Focus not on how to push content to your customer community, but more on how to enable that community to pull the information they need in the way that makes the most sense to each individual participant.

By Paulette- Beezblog Editor