Ad-Ventures in Marketing!

Reduce Churn through Social and Continuous Learning

2010-11-26T19:03:00.000-08:00

Did you know that global firms spend 50 times more on recruiting than training? This is one of the reasons, Nick Van Dam contends, that leads to significant churn within the most talented employees... In his book "25 best practices in learning & talent development" he delivers very clearly articulated best practices gleaned throughout the course of his work at Deloitte. He elaborates on how to use learning to build the company brand image for career growth and development.

And, his definition of the Chief Learning Officer as the chief architect of the learning organization that must design learning interventions and solutions that support both continuous individual learning, as well as, organizational learning is right on! Also, his views regarding the role of informal learning and simulation games will prove very useful to the success of the multi generational, multi cultural and always-on enterprise of the 21st century.

http://amzn.to/fH5Kov

The Role of Informal Learning in the New Workplace

2010-11-16T16:00:00.000-08:00

In a world where knowledge has become increasingly perishable, people learn best through a combination of having the right knowledge in the right context with the right people. Knowing the right people to ask the right question has more power than knowing all the answers. The process of managing informal learning in an organization is commonly achieved through the deployment of Social Learning solutions. Nurturing and harnessing informal learning enables organizations to surround their people with structured and unstructured learning experiences so they can easily access what they need to learn and what they want to learn.

The workplace is, more often than not, now a place of shifting needs and responsibilities rather than a hierarchy set of jobs with interchangeable people to fill a structured set of job titles. Saba Social Learning is built to adapt to the changing nature of work.

Tag it, share it, discuss it, bookmark it, contribute it, add classmates to the group: the social experience of learning is flexible and boundless. Combined with the strength of formal learning, these experiences engage learners and accelerate how fast people learn. Further Saba Social Learning’s “always on” experience reinforces how learners change behavior and put learning into practice.

Crossing the valley of death - according to Chevron's Jim Davis

2010-02-26T11:26:00.000-08:00

I thought that you might be interested in how Chevron Energy Solutions's president characterizes the role of the Cleantech Open as an innovation catalyst: http://bit.ly/9YCcxw

Enjoy!

Accelerate your sales cycle with Sales 2.0

2010-02-23T17:27:00.000-08:00

For those of you who have an interest in improving your sales process I highly recommend Anneke Sele’s book Sales 2.0 at http://www.amazon.com/Sales-2-0-Innovative-Practices-Technology/dp/047037375X/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

Having rolled-out the first Oracle web site in the 90’s, in a (very successful) effort to increase the penetration of the Oracle database in the mid-market, I had the opportunity to work very closely with Oracle’s inside sales organization. I later took advantage of this experience to design Siebel’s enterprise CRM software, which gave me the privilege to work with some of the most talented companies who were trying to build great sales organizations and were striving to integrate the multiple channels of customer communications!

I certainly wish that Anneke Sele’s book had been available at the time as it very clearly and realistically explains and underscores how successful sales organizations need to use contemporary technology and while codifying processes from prospect inquiry to customer close. Anneke’s emphasis on a common lead framework between sales and marketing is right on! Don’t wait to implement a low-latency sales cycle: Implement Sales 2.0 now.

Increasing sales velocity though Enterprise Social Networks: FICO

2010-02-09T19:31:00.000-08:00

At the interface of main street and Wall Street, FICO (previously known as Fair Isaac) caters both to consumers and businesses and delivers a wide range of predictive analytic solutions. The company generates more than half of its B2B leads from digital marketing through a very deliberate use of social networks both, private and public.

The main reason social networking is so important to FICO is that it enables both prospects and customers to educate and inform themselves by communicating with other similarly minded people in a safe and semi-structured environment, in their own language, 24/7. My strategy was to build FICO’s own private enterprise social network, decisions.fico.com, and to use public social networks like YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/user/FICOTechTalk#p/u, LinkedIn and Twitter to attract potential participants. This strategy, coupled with a user interface focused on maximizing positive user experience, has been very successful. In a very short period of time, we’ve managed to attract thousands and thousands of professionals to join FICO’s online-community the world over.

This project is a real-life example of how to put cloud computing to work to enable and facilitate customer engagement: By inviting our customers to become our most valuable collaborators with regard to defining new product requirements and other enhancements to our services.

FICO’s private enterprise social network, decisions.fico.com, was launched in a matter of weeks. It uses Salesforce Ideas and Lithium Customer Community applications. It integrates with Six Apart’s Typepad, Amazon EC2 and Sharepoint. The vision that lead to this strategy sprang from the marketing team working in very close collaboration with the CIO. The bulk of the implementation for this cloud-based composite application was outsourced to Salesforce’s partner, Reside.

The community is open to everybody using or evaluating FICO technology and services such as Chief Risk Officers, business analysts, developers and many others. Demos, free trials, and best practices are all a click away. Expanding he FICO community from the physical world to the digital world has been a very worthwhile investment! And, let’s not forget that for the customer‘s experience to be successful, the interaction must be multi-channel and consistent both on-line and in-person.

Tribute to a giant: Art Rosenfeld, the father of energy efficiency

2010-02-04T10:24:00.000-08:00

I had the honor and privilege of meeting Art several years ago at the launch of what was then called the Stanford Institute for the Environment. The launch constituted of several days of fascinating world class presentations and conversations about- you guessed it- the environment and climate change. I have great memories of all the speeches but none as vivid as Art’s presentation. Art had very few slides and the ones he had weren’t very polished. However, his knowledge, passion, style and above all humor were absolutely riveting. Bear in mind that Art was talking about how to make cities more energy efficient… I couldn’t wait to meet him. Which I did after the crowd around him had subsided. He generously spent half an hour with me discussing the economic merits of energy efficiency vs. renewables.

A few years later, I called him at the California Energy Commission to help me launch the then fledgling Clean Tech Open - The mission of the California Clean Tech Open is to encourage the development of clean technology companies that foster a healthy natural environment. Yet again, I was struck by his generosity and kindness. He took the time to understand what we wanted to achieve, provided guidance and made many invaluable introductions at the C-PUC, LBNL and PG&E. He also accepted very graciously to be a keynote speaker at the launch of the Clean Tech Open at San Francisco city hall, on March 21,2006. He has remained a staunch supporter of the Clean Tech Open and I could not thank him enough for his support. Art will once again be the keynote speaker at the Feb 26, 2010 national launch of the competition!

Art received his Ph. D. in Physics under Enrico Fermi and later formed the Center for Building Science at LBNL. He received the Enrico Fermi award in 2006 and co-founded the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy. He is stepping down from the California Energy Commission and he will be sorely missed.

Recently I installed a “cool roof” on my own house, an action of which Art is a big proponent. My daughters love our new “cool roof”, as well as, the many other energy efficient design features we are incorporating into our current home renovation. Thanks to people like Art, with his passion, vision and incredible intellect kids today are more inspired and aware of energy use issues than ever before.

Consumer empowerment and FICO scores

2009-07-28T18:47:00.000-07:00

Understanding FICO scores is critical for Consumers who want to take back control of their credit. Indeed, FICO scores are now used not only by lenders when purchasing a car, buying or refinancing a house but also by more and more employers as a measure of character and financial responsibility! In the Forbes video below with Quentin Hardy, I share where to get help to keep your FICO scores up so that you can get the best possible deal on your mortgage and the job you want.

Enterprise sustainability in the real world...

2009-07-27T17:53:00.000-07:00

FICO is on its way to reduce its carbon footprint by 50% over three years with no incremental budget, only leadership and vision. This Forbes video with Quentin Hardy is a quick exploration into how it all happened!

Branding as a refocusing exercise: FICO

2009-07-01T17:05:00.000-07:00

"March 10, 2009: In the interest of clarity and consistency, Fair Isaac Corporation today announced that it has officially adopted the brand FICO as its corporate identity." This corporate renaming qualifies both as adoption of initials, and elevation of a product brand to the corporate level.

What, or who, is a Fair Isaac? A nice guy, in the credit rating business? As a name, it scores at the top in "whimsical," if not positively cuddly. Turns out, however, that there were two guys, Bill Fair and Earl Isaac, who in 1956 founded "Fair, Isaac and Company" (whence the initials FICO). The comma got lost in 2003, when the legal name Fair Isaac Corporation was adopted. But "Simply removing the comma changed nothing," says Chief marketing Officer Laurent Pacalin; "journalists would still talk about Fair Isaac as 'the guy who did FICO'."

And what is a FICO? Fair Isaac's principal product is the "FICO Score," a credit worthiness number carried by virtually every American, and the leading measure of consumer credit risk in the U.S. It is a number thus central to both crisis and recovery.

This is what Tony Spaeth, Corporate Brand Matrix, had to say about the brand work that we did here at FICO! Read more here.

Three ways to shrink Systemic Risk

2009-06-26T13:51:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia defines “financial systemic risk” as, “the risk of sudden collapse of an entire system or market…due to potentially catastrophic instability in that interlinked and interdependent system or market.” That’s a fine definition, but few of us need to look it up. It’s been nine months and counting since systemic risk erupted, and the global financial system is still tiptoeing around the smoking crater. As the worst recession of our lifetimes grinds on, institutions and governments are working feverishly to build strategic and regulatory protections against future systemic risk cataclysms.

In my view, government regulators and financial executives will have the greatest chance of success in managing and mitigating systemic risk if they understand and act on three related lessons that are emerging from the trauma that began in the autumn of 2008:

 First, beneath the fearsome complexity that can obscure the working of markets, the value of all financial relationships is still defined by the quality of the underwriting – defining underwriting in the broadest possible sense. The old rules still rule: Know your borrower. Know your lender. It’s a simple concept, but the market environment in recent decades has made it harder and harder to execute. We must repair the markets in a way that enables 360-degree underwriting based on clear, transparent, trustworthy data and relationships.

 Second, of all the characteristics that define economic activity, connection is the most important. Institutions considered “too big to fail” are in reality “too connected to fail.” The web of interdependencies that girdles the globe, linking the boardrooms of Wall Street to the kitchen tables of Main Street, can be the economic system’s greatest vulnerability – as Nassim Taleb argues in The Black Swan – or its greatest strength. Job No. 1 for leaders of the world’s financial institutions and market-regulating bodies is to design the architecture of systemic connection to assure strength. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un2Ve-8f3W4

 Third, despite the enormity of the task facing us, there is a good place to start where we can gain swift traction, and that is with microdecisions – the innumerable individual economic decisions financial professionals and consumers make every day on a global basis. To be clear, I’m not talking about trivial mini-decisions. Microdecisions are the fundamental building blocks of the economic system on all levels. “This [financial] crisis started one mortgage at a time,” Dr. Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard Law School professor who chairs the Congressional oversight panel on government bailout spending, told The New York Times on June 18.

Searching for the Triple Bottom Line

2008-12-18T23:41:00.000-08:00

Fair Isaac owner of the FICO scores has launched a Sustainable Enterprise Initiative whose objective is to reduce the carbon footprint of the company. As the chief marketing officer I have been in an ideal position to support the CIO, Christopher Rence, in his successful efforts to green up Fair Isaac data centers through IT virtualization and leverage of cloud computing.

It is always very re-assuring to see that significant results can be achieved under the right leaderhip!

Creative Capitalism vs. Compassionate Capitalism

2008-10-26T22:07:00.000-07:00

I thought that it'd be interesting to compare and contrast two concepts of capitalism as promoted by Bill Gates (Creative Capitalism) and by Marc Benioff (Compassionate Capitalism).

So, I read Marc Benioff book articulating his vision for Compassionate Capitalism and listened to Bill Gates'speach touting Creative Capitalism in Davos. I found both visions similar, very inspiring and necessary to unleash the "forces of good" onto our planet!

The following video will provide you with a starting point:

Salesforce's Tour de Force

2008-02-01T15:14:00.000-08:00

On Jan. 17, I attended Salesforce’s Tour de Force at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The two keynote speakers were Marc Benioff and Marc Andreessen. The event was billed as an unprecedented meeting of the minds of the two Marcs sharing their vision for the future of on-demand platforms.

It was a very good event, well organized and high-energy as one would have expected! However, it was focused on the launched of Force.com, the platform -as-a-service, that had been announced at Dreamforce last September. This was a bit of a disappointment as I had been expecting the announcement of a partnership between Ning and Salesforce.com. As I have written before (see Ultimate Networks, Jan. 1, 2008) I believe that social networks could significantly benefits B2B processes. Instead, Marc Andreessen squarely positioned Ning as a consumer centric social network platform. I had misread the tea leaves…

But not to despair, there is a Los Angeles company that provides what seems to be quite an interesting offering to build customer communities – http://www.thinkpassenger.com/ – Passenger combines social networking, collaboration and analytics technologies in a single platform. Passenger’s vision is to change the way companies collaborate with their customers, stakeholders and peers across social, geographic and organizational boundaries.

It certainly is a tall order but most definitely transformational and worth a try!

Social Networks and Water Purification in Buenos Aires

2008-01-25T23:12:00.000-08:00

In a previous post (Ultimate Networks, Jan. 8, 2008) I wrote about the role of social networks in B2B environments. Today I’d like to comment on a fascinating Clean Tech application developed by Rebeca Hwang, a friend and Stanford PhD student, as well as the Judging Chair for the California Clean Tech Open (Social Networks, Pizza and Clean Tech, Dec. 14, 2007).

Rebeca’s objective is to use her technical know-how in water treatment technology and her research in quantitative theory of social networks to improve water quality in the slums of Buenos Aires. The water in Buenos Aires’ sprawling slums carries birth-defect-causing nitrates and arsenic in amounts up to 10 times what is considered safe. Because of the lack of government resources, communities have formed water cooperatives to help provide clean water to their constituents. Unfortunately, many of these co-ops are small and not always well managed so water treatment and delivery services lack funding. Moreover, while it is cost-efficient to treat water for 100,000 households, these co-ops have only an average of 2,000 houses each and are therefore rarely profitable.

Rebeca Hwang believes that this considerable challenge can be addressed by applying social networks analysis to map out the relationships between decision-makers at water cooperatives. The idea is that the identification of patterns can pinpoint an organization’s strengths and weaknesses, and in turn, may help that organization to improve its efficiency and effectiveness.
The characterization of the structure of these 480 water cooperatives - servicing 700,000 households - is a massive undertaking. One that requires, through extensive surveys, the tagging of the co-ops by service type and managerial style, both formal and informal. Rebeca is using open-source software programs like Pajek and Ucinet to analyze and convert the raw data into meaningful information. Also, she anticipates that using another program like NetDraw to visualize the intensity of the relationships between the different constituents will reveal some key problem areas. Interviews will complement the study and bring qualitative color to the motivations and approaches of decision makers that may be influencing the various co-op operations but that are not formally represented in their structures.

The expected outcome of this “social network analysis” project is to formulate specific ways to improve the profitability of the cooperatives while increasing the volume of clean water produced.

I believe that innovative approaches, like this one, that leverage existing technologies and apply social network analysis theory can provide a significant boost toward improving people’s daily life while maximizing the use of natural resources. Such project does not require huge investment or new technology. It empowers local communities and enables greater sustainability. Please drop me a line if you know of other interesting clean tech social applications.

Soccer 2.0: Germany vs.Greece as seen by Monty Python!

2008-01-21T09:26:00.000-08:00

A very clever video from Monty Python on Soccer philosophy... There are many more like this on Gary Ireland's vlog listed on the right hand side.

Where in the World are Laure Manaudou and Hope Solo?

2008-01-15T23:15:00.000-08:00

Laure Manaudou is a French Olympic, European and world champion swimmer. Hope Solo is a goal keeper for the US Women’s National Soccer team. Both are very successful athletes whose notoriety has reached far beyond their respective sports. Laure Manaudou‘s new found fame was generated by a humoristic piece entitled “Laure Manaudou Sex Video” on YouTube that drew more than 1M viewers. The joke is that the video was about monkeys and fortunately not about Laure Manaudou. Because of all the attention it garnered, Laure Manaudou was also in the top 5 searches on Technorati for quite some time…

As for Hope Solo, she gained tremendous publicity through her temporary exile from the U.S. Women’s National Team. Indeed, her exile became the dominant story line at the 2007 FIFA Women’s World Cup. Unbeaten Hope Solo was benched by the coach in favor of veteran goalkeeper Briana Scurry just before a crucial semifinal game against Brazil that the US ended up loosing. USA today reported that this incident drove up ESPN’s ratings and filled blogs and comment pages with a passion not seen since the big USA win at the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup and Brandi Chastain’s jersey toss. In addition, there was a back-story to this incident recounting Hope Solo’s relationship to her father and his tragic passing a few months before the World Cup.

I’m relating these two “soap” stories to illustrate how public attention – though ever so short term- is driven by what I’d call the phenomenon of “Tribal Voyeurism”. I believe that it is critically important for B2B marketers to research and understand the mechanics of “Tribal Voyeurism”. Indeed, the glaciers between the B2C and B2B worlds, if they ever existed, are definitely melting! They’re melting not because of global warming but because, as noted before, of the ever increasing use of social media tools in the enterprise. Moreover, the hyper-mediatized “prosumer” has been completely saturated and become indifferent to the un-imaginative, un-inspired gobbledygook prose dished out by the vast majority of B2B marketers, and is hungering for a more genuine and entertaining style of communication!

I’m by no means suggesting that B2B marketers should become unsavory, voyeuristic, and soapy, but rather that they need to learn to appreciate and accept how professionals access and evaluate information. There are many successful companies that have succeeded in attracting and keeping the public interest either through style, meaning or both. This includes the likes of Apple, Salesforce.com, Facebook, PG&E (yes, the utility company), Interface and many others. So, break the mold. Create. Imagine. And have some fun!

Even the Moon Cried

2008-01-11T20:26:00.000-08:00

“Come along now, we mustn’t be late,” my mother insisted as she tugged me forward by my hand. I quickened my pace; I did not want to upset her tonight. It was April 14, 1865, the night that Abraham Lincoln was to attend the show Our American Cousin, and the last person I wanted seeing my mother scold me was my own president. I caught up to her and began looking around. I saw so many people talking, mingling around, not too many children though, yet an adult accompanied every child I saw. I kept close to my mother: not wanting to get lost in all the chaos. I breathed in the chilled, night air and gazed up at the stars. They shone brightly in the dark night sky. The full moon hung, stranded apart from the stars. As I looked at it, my eyes lead me to believe a large smile crossed it’s round face. I smiled back at it.

“Jane, what on earth are you up to?” my mother asked, “would you rather watch the still stars than the performance?”
“No Mother,” I answered in a shameful, low voice. I forced my gaze down to my polished black shoes as they clattered along the stones on the ground.
“Then hurry up darling,” my mother instructed. I did as I was told.

We found our seats after much trouble, and happily sat down. I flipped through the pages of my program. The number of actors and actresses overwhelmed me. I read through the brief preview of the performance, and when I was through sat quietly in my seat. I was confronted with so much time and so little things to do. My fingertips traced the fancy letters on the cover of the program that read: Our American Cousin.

“Jane darling, look up there,” my mother said softly, nudging my arm and gesturing toward the boxes in the back, specifically toward box seven’s balcony. There, I saw no one other than Abraham Lincoln.

“Goodness gracious,” I said under my breath. I had never imagined myself so close to such an important man. I looked again at my mother; she smiled and widened her eyes at my thrilled face. I giggled slightly, and sat back in my seat. Every moment I wanted to look back, but I knew quite well staring was impolite. Finally the show started, and I did my best to keep my curious eyes on the stage.

The actors and actresses were doing a magnificent job in the performance, and I was thoroughly enjoying myself. Then one of the performers said something so humorous everyone broke out in laughter. In the midst of all jolly voices, an unmistakable sound shook through Ford’s theatre. It was the sound of a single gun shoot. It did not come from the stage, that I was certain. I swirled around in my seat in desperation, and saw my most dreaded thought in my mind.

The president’s head hung low, and he slouched in the seat in which he sat. A man stood behind him with a gun visible in his hand. Everyone had seen it. Suddenly a military major who I guessed to be Major Henry Rathbone, leaped onto the man with the gun. But the man with the gun got away after quite a wrestle, and leaped from the balcony. It all happened so fast my eyes could hardly follow. Screams rang through the audience, and what I thought to be chaos outside earlier, did not resemble this by any means.

People ran and yelled, they cried and held each other, some going absolutely crazy. I felt a comfortingly firm hold on my shoulder from my mother. Remembering her presence, I turned and flung my arms around her in complete fright. It was then I saw the man with the gun. He leaped onto the stage and began to spew off words in a language I could not for the life of me understand. Then he ran again and out of the theatre.

It took much time to settle everyone down, and rightfully so. After all, it was our president who had just been murdered, and not to mention practically in front of our very own eyes! Though after all were quiet, a man entered form the back of the room and began to make his way down the aisle. He walked with pace and purpose, and although I do believe he was fully aware that every eye in the room was on him and intended to stay that way, he took absolutely no notice what so ever. My ears would not hear the words that came from his mouth when he reached the front of the room and began to speek, but to the forceful blow of the gunshot I had heard so clearly about an hour before. As I realized he was leading everyone out in an orderly fashion, I obediently followed every step my mother took. I held her hand far more tightly than I ever had. When we finally reached the door, I stepped out in relief. I was alive and unharmed. But my president on the other hand, was certainly not.

Everyone around me wept, even my own mother. I felt tears trickle down my cheeks. I gulped in the crisp, late night air, and desperately looked up at the sky as if expecting a miracle. Of course, it didn’t come. I looked all around for the moon, and finally found it. I wanted to see it’s smile, thinking perhaps, just perhaps, it would comfort me. Though to my dismay, what I found across the moon’s bright face was not a warm smile, but many, many cold tears.

Zoe Pacalin #22

Ultimate Networks

2008-01-08T19:36:00.000-08:00

For some odd reason (Facebook anyone?), I celebrated New Year’s Eve embroiled in a heated conversation debating the merits (or lack thereof) of on-line social networks. One side of the argument was defended by very accomplished academics and the other by very successful and pragmatic business folks.

I don’t intend to recant all the details of this rather entertaining argument, but instead I’ll attempt to net-it-out while sharing with you my vision of how to make good use of these networks in a - social media- marketing context.

Of course, this enlightened crowd was well aware of the fact that new media can generate a non-local community and that this phenomenon isn’t new at all! In fact, if Wikipedia has it right, scholars associated with the Royal Society of London had already formed a community through the exchange of letters in the 17th century.

My objective, in the conversation, was to move past the theory of social networks and explore the use of today’s electronic social networks as tools for business. I don’t know about you, but I have neither the interest, nor the time to write notes on Facebook’s walls or share my daily activities on Twitter. There is way too much clutter and noise as it is!

My interest in professional social networks was first triggered some time ago when I was deeply involved in designing customer satisfaction and customer reference programs at Oracle and Siebel Systems. Invariably, the results, of these then state-of-the-art programs were very structured, contrived and certainly not real-time… Yes, they made great slides and gave an impression of control, however, the fact is that such programs are expensive, infrequently conducted, do not always distinguish between buyers, users or other influencers, are of very limited use for timely fixes of problems or for product development, and most certainly are a huge pain to customers.

My vision is to replace these static, non-interactive, memory-less programs by leveraging modern social network platforms. [I’m using platform in the sense of open APIs that run in the environment created by the social network (Facebook, Linkedin)]. As we develop these newly conceived programs across multiple social networks we should be able to identify lurkers, novices, regulars or other change agents and leaders, as well as, implicit or explicit unmet customer needs. Imagine: No need to get IT involved, no extra budget, self declared participation, and always-on interaction with your customers, very cool indeed!

I got the feeling that several in the conversation thought that some of these needs were already being addressed via the traditional technical on-line support groups, as well as, by public forums like Dell’s “Idea Storm” (www.ideastorm.com) and Salesforce’s “Success Force” (success.salesforce.com). Some also felt that the presently available tools like dynamic network analysis (DNA) and multi-agent systems (MAS) are only suited for very large networks. Perhaps my friends are correct and the currently available statistical tools do not lend themselves well to the analysis of smaller social networks. And certainly, “Idea Storm” and “Success Force” are steps in the right direction.

However, I’m still convinced that once social network portability takes hold we will be able to develop and use a suite of analytical applications that will help us better understand the quality and intensity of the relationships between network participants, as well as, brand sentiment and the role of influencers in shaping opinions. More important however, is that the potential benefit to business of such digital interaction optimization applications is huge! So, rather than waiting for Facebook, Linkedin and others to agree on a “Social Network Interop Protocol”and extend their applications, let’s use current web2.0 tools like Ning, Scout Labs, Umbria, Omniture, Google Analytics and other widgets to deploy the new CRM and create competitive advantage!

Soccer Rocker Poem

2008-01-06T10:09:00.001-08:00

Hi! I'm Zoe and I love to play Soccer. I play half-back for a great club (UFC) in Palo Alto and love to watch games. Leave a comment to let me know if you like my poem!

YouTube and Viewer Responsiveness Index

2007-12-24T13:42:00.000-08:00

Today, it was too cold for me to go on a bike ride... Instead, I played sleuth and joined the digital natives on YouTube! I explored the correlation between “brand” and the number of video viewers for a selected set of companies. The results were quite surprising! The companies I selected are enterprise apps companies Oracle and SAP, Internet juggernauts Yahoo and Google, Salesforce.com as the enterprise 2.0 proxy, FaceBook as the Social Network / Internet platform, and Microsoft as Microsoft.

In an effort to remain objective, I chose to be very quantitative. I added up the number of viewers for the first five videos for each company, sorted by “relevance” and “all time”, as well as the number of comments and ratings. I then created a ratio that I call the “Viewer Responsiveness Index” – VR Index – to characterize the engagement of the viewer vis-à-vis the video.

Et voila, the winner on total views is FaceBook with more viewers than Google and Microsoft combined! And, first place for the VR Index goes to Microsoft with a score of 3.80, but keep on reading as the numbers themselves aren’t the whole story.

Indeed, quantitative analysis is great but it can only take you so far. So let’s enter a more subjective and qualitative world.

Oracle and SAP have the worst VR Index which may be explained by the fact that their videos are geared at techies and that watching a video about SAP NetWeaver or Oracle Fusion doesn’t necessarily generate a lot of excitement. By contrast, Salesforce.com videos are packed with humor and more fun to watch. So, while total viewership is the lowest of the companies surveyed, Salesforce generates a VR Index of 3.41 with mostly positive comments!

So by now you must be thinking: How is it possible for Microsoft to obtain such a high VR Index? Well, if you work in Marketing at Microsoft, don’t get too smug… The most watched video for Microsoft is Microsoft Surface Parody with 1,550,904 viewers. And, Punish Your Microsoft Developer garners 214,280 viewers alone… I guess people like to make fun of the Redmond Empire.

Google’s technical videos got a little bit more traction than Oracle’s or SAP’s, but what really boosts Google’s numbers are the Google Earth videos that all told reach nearly 2,000,000 viewers. As for Yahoo, the number of total viewers would have fallen below 80,000 if it weren’t for a Japanese video called Hard Gay Japan with 203,392 viewers.

So, where am I going with all of this? One thing is for sure, as the video-web becomes more important than the text-web, companies will need to keep an eye or two on what’s happening on YouTube. And while one could argue that comparing Oracle to Google in the context of YouTube is not meaningful, I hope that everybody will agree that comparing Google to Yahoo is very relevant! The unresolved question is whether the VR Index is a backward or looking-forward indicator.

OK, it’s time for me to bring my daughters to soccer practice. Happy holidays!

How far can you reach with IPTV?

2007-12-20T11:10:00.000-08:00

Do you think that IPTV is television over the Internet?

If you said yes, sorry to disappoint, but you loose. IPTV stands for Internet Protocol Television. It’s a transport mechanism that telephone companies and cable operators use to deliver a television like experience. For now, most of the operator-deployed IPTV systems are designed to be walled gardens.

The systems operators want to deploy in walled gardens to ensure quality of service (QOS) and limit hacking and piracy. IPTV over the public Internet is called “streaming video”. As mentioned in a previous post, Shelly Palmer describes these technologies and their application very well in “Television Disrupted”.

A predictable quality of service and control over content aggregation is very critical for advertisers as they want to enhance the viewing experience and protect their brand. They also want to have as good a knowledge as possible of who is viewing their ads. IPTV offers a two-way system that allows for census based measurement – as opposed to sample based like AC Nielsen – and transactional user experience. In addition, the deployment of IPTV systems on video game platforms, portable video devices, and the growing adoption of DVRs allows for a consumer-based time-shifted experience.

This is, pardon the cliché, a true paradigm change! Clearly, to be effective in this new framework requires to think in terms of addressable and dynamic ads… It also requires having tremendous creativity and imagination, as well as, good processes to keep budgets under control. I find this so very exciting: Better knowledge, more imagination and more fun!

If you think that I’m getting carried away, take a look at the IPTV Subscribers Wordwilde 2006-2011 forecast from iSuppli Corporation and eMarketer from April 2007. The survey predicts the number of subscribers worldwide to grow from roughly 4 million in 2006 to over 100 million in 2011, with 45% of the viewers in Europe, 39% in Asia and 16%in the Americas.

Youth Soccer and Viral Marketing

2007-12-17T09:44:00.000-08:00

My beloved wife and I spent our weekend watching one of our daughters compete in the Norcal Cup soccer tournament. I have two daughters and both of them have recently joined a terrific club in Palo Alto called the Union Football Club (UFC). UFC (www.unionfootballclub.com) is run by a family of former soccer professionals (Gary, Carine, Simon and Vic Ireland) very close to the Women’s US National Team, Stanford Soccer and Julie Foudy. They support the “Right To Play” program: Right To Play is an athlete-driven international humanitarian organization that uses sport and play as a tool for the development of children and youth in the most disadvantaged areas of the world. Right To Play is committed to improving the lives of these children and to strengthening their communities by translating the best practices of sport and play into opportunities to promote development, health and peace. Also, UFC recently had John Owens, assistant academy director from Liverpool FC, as a guest coach.

My point is that this club is actively connecting on a worldwide scale. So, how is it possible for a relatively small soccer club to run such a quality program with global reach? This is the question that I was pondering while driving back from the game…

My first thought was that due to their total passion and dedication for the kids and soccer they had created a very viral marketing program by default! Then, I decided to check how those who had coined the term viral marketing , actually defined it. According to Steve Jurvetson, the term was coined in a Netscape newsletter in 1997 and defined loosely as “network-enhanced word of mouth”. One of the critical elements of viral marketing is that every customer becomes an involuntary salesperson by using the product. So far, so good, UFC is definitely viral as every player tries to bring their friends over! Technically, it’s called usage affiliation. However, Steve Jurvetson goes on to say, using Hotmail as an example, that their subscriber base grew from zero to 12 million users in 18 months, and that from a memetic engineering perspective, viral marketing takes place when an idea spreads like an adaptive virus.

All right, all right, may be it doesn’t have quite the necessary scale to be called viral marketing. May be it was just plain silly of me to try to codify this club’s success in marketing terms. What really matters is that the coaches have tremendous skills, dedication and gumption and that the kids love them. Now that I think about it, a more appropriate analysis should have been framed in the context of “Zen and the Art of Youth Soccer Coaching”, an exploration into the Metaphysics of soccer quality!

Social Networks, Pizza and Clean Tech

2007-12-14T11:32:00.000-08:00

I thought I’d share a very successful and personal story about a Clean Tech initiative that epitomizes what Community Marketing is all about: The California Clean Tech Open (www.cacleantech.com). Within its first year of existence the California Clean Tech Open became the richest Clean Tech competition in the nation, was awarded an MIT presidential citation and recognized as one of the 100 best ideas in the New York Times! Now, in its 3rd year the California Clean Tech Open has raised directly more than $2 million in prize (cash and services) and has helped the competition winners raise more than $10 million from the venture community.

It all started back in the fall of 2005 at a conference of the MIT Club of Northern California Clean Tech Program. Several of us had identified a structural vacuum, in the then nascent Clean Tech segment, between entrepreneurs, academics, national labs like Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the venture community. We believed that this vacuum was significantly slowing down the commercialization and adoption of promising clean technologies. So, we decided to create a business plan competition that would act as a catalyst to foster and accelerate innovation. The California Clean Tech Open was born, as a non-profit organization staffed by volunteers. Our motto: By entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs! Our modus operandi: Speed and excellence in execution!

On March 21, 2006, less than five months later, the competition was officially launched at San Francisco City Hall with a keynote address by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, joined by several guests including Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Tom King CEO of PG&E, Dian Grueneich Commissioner California Public Utility Commission, and a representative from the Governor’s office. We announced that we would give a $100,000 “Start-up-in-a-box” prize to the five category winners. The original five categories were: Renewables, Transportation, Energy Efficiency, Smart Power and Water Management, (Green Buildings was added for the 2007 competition).

On Sept 26, 2006, the North Light Court in San Francisco City Hall filled with over 250 attendees to witness the awards ceremony. We were honored to host such national, state, and industry leaders as California Energy Commissioner Art Rosenfeld, National Resource Defense Council Co-Director Ralph Cavanaugh and renowned venture capitalist and biofuels expert Vinod Khosla, Principal and Founder of Khosla Ventures. The 2006 prize sponsors were Agora Foundation, AMD, Lexus, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Sempra Energy and Southern California Edison. Charter partners included A&R Edelman, MIT club of Northern California and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati! This very elite group was joined in 2007 by Google.

It has been by all measures a great success and while we certainly made mistakes along the way, here is what we did right:

1. Identified a significant need where there was pent-up demand
2. Defined a clear mission for the organization
3. Developed a simple strategic plan to ensure maximum speed of execution
4. Articulated a clear value proposition for all constituencies
5. Adapted our plan to reflect feedback
6. Focused on delivering value to the contestants (training, mentoring, feedback sessions)
7. Were absolutely passionate about our mission

More specifically, and from a Marketing standpoint, we focused on getting the word out to the constituencies we wanted to reach. Indeed, getting immediate reach was critical for us as we needed both to generate interest with high-quality sponsors and attract high-level entrepreneurs. Building a targeted social network was job #1. The MIT Club Clean Tech Program created a group on Linkedin, we used Eloqua for mailings and established a Yahoo group for internal communication. And while Job #1 was very much around “push”, job #2 had to be around “pull” if we were to succeed. This meant aggressive PR (thank you A&R Edelman), a website with as many self-service capabilities as possible (registration forms, FAQs, eligibility rules,…), as well as, strong established ecosystem partners like CalCEF, CleanEdge, Greenjobs and the Cleantech Venture Network. We were hoping to reach out to grad students through social media marketing on FaceBook and mySpace but for several reasons had to go more low-tech and hired an outfit to do “postering” on 30+ campuses. This didn’t work out at all! Fortunately, this flop did not prevent the contestants from signing up “en masse”, as we had to review close to 200 business plans in various stages… Our web team did a bang up job and spent many nights de-bugging the application (remember that everybody had a day job). As far as media coverage goes, we must have had a pretty compelling story that resulted in news or bylined articles from KTVU Channel 2, MSNBC, CleanEdge News, Red Herring, ZDNet, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, Motley Fool, local papers like the Palo Alto Weekly and the Almanac, as well as, more long-tail coverage from the New York Times (100 Best Ideas for 2006) and IEEE. Wilson Sonsini very generously helped us organize our summer workshops program (Clean Tech 201 Entrepreneur Series) where very accomplished entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and renowned academics came to assist the entrepreneurs finalize their business plans.

The California Clean Tech Open is a great example of Community Marketing. While passion, talent and dedication amongst the core volunteers is essential, success would not be possible without the enormous good will of the sponsors and partners who continue to generously support this initiative with their time, resources and even more critically with their advice. Yet, despite Linkedin and social media marketing tools, the real magic throughout the process has been the team dinners, that one of us - let’s call him Mickey so as not to embarrass him - keeps throwing with good beer and Amici’s pizzas!

The Video Web - Better, Faster and Cheaper

2007-12-12T15:43:00.000-08:00

In a survey published in Sept. 2007, McKinsey confirmed that marketing executives around the world were moving online across the spectrum of marketing activities, from building awareness to after-sales service and that they see online tools as an important and effective component of their marketing strategies! However, the use of wikis and virtual worlds was more limited because of an absence of meaningful metrics.

Also, McKinsey reported that spending on digital advertising was set to increase significantly. The video ads category was the fastest growing with 74% of the respondents saying that they would increase spending over the next three years.

As discussed previously, I believe that one of the reasons for the expected growth is the maturity of content creation tools as well as more reliable delivery options (CDNs). Tools and services that facilitate the management and tracking of the digital assets (watermark, fingerprinting,…) at a lower cost and with a better experience for the viewers.

Akamai, with Stream OS, outputs video in multiple formats, so content provider don’t have to manually reformat outgoing content for each type of recipient. Moreover, the metadata attached to video and audio content includes rules and cue for how the content should be distributed, as well as description for search engines. BitTorrent, previously synonymous with digital piracy, announced early October a new enterprise CDN product called BitTorrent DNA. BitTorrent DNA is designed for publishers seeking ways to overcome slow downloads and choppy video streams. Brightcove is the first customer for BitTorrent DNA.

In addition many other more recent vendors like Joost, Babelgum, BitGravity and Rinera Networks continue to improve both QOS and Digital Asset Management at a frantic pace.

The Video Web and New Product Introduction

2007-12-11T22:01:00.000-08:00

When I created the first on-line presence for Oracle in 1994 / 1995 with the Oracle Store, the web was essentially text-based, not very interactive and banner ads barely getting started. Many companies were either reluctant or afraid of using this new media! Well, we are now well into Web2.0 and more accessible technology and maturing business models are opening the floodgates for video on the web. I’m thinking specifically about the Enterprise in a business-to-business context.

At the MIT’s Enterprise Forum’s Brave New Web conference in February, Jeremy Allaire Brightcove’s CEO was saying that the Internet was rapidly moving from a “text web” to a “video web”. I couldn’t agree more. He added that Brightcove was developing several “social media” additions to work with its video hosting and distribution system. This type of technology will allow viewers to participate in the creation of content and therefore enable interactivity.

Imagine how corporations who embrace and master the “video web” could dramatically re-invent the way they do new product introduction, partner and employee training, as well as facilitate customer’s adoption! Unfortunately, I’m developing a certain sense of déjà-vu… Yet again, very few have the imagination and creativity to think “video” mode and are still in the animated Microsoft’s Powerpoint mode… I guess that we are still in the classic Geoff Moore’s early adopter phase and that the tornado hasn’t arrived yet!