The tide of marketing is turning at last.  After more than 13 years of battling against autistic -- and largely inefficient -- old world marketing techniques and visions, we are now witnessing a few cracks in the ice of top-down marketing strategy.  Firstly, Regis Mc Kenna and Geoffrey Moore introduced new ways of dealing with clients mainly in the IT world at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s.  The approach was no longer demographic but behavioural.  Secondly, European researchers Badot & Cova wrote their ground-breaking opus entitled "neo-marketing[Fr]" in 1992 (many were to follow) introducing so-called "societal" approaches to marketing and even suggesting we use the term "societing [En]" instead of marketing.

The end of the 1990s were the founding years of -- not only of the Internet but -- the revision of marketing as we know it.  Seth Godin taught us that ideas are viruses -- and so are products and services -- hence the newer and more pervasive notions of Buzz marketing.  He also re-educated us (yes, I insist, really re-educated) so that we ask permission from our clients to do business with them.  Not only was that the early sign that e-mail marketing had to be done differently, but it also sent a clear warning sign to mass marketers that business habits had to change in view of evolving consumer behaviours.  1999 was the kick-off year for the much revered Clue-train manifesto, a source which is still quoted today as the reference for online marketing.  And more recently, Tara Hunt has developed the notion of Pinko marketing, a rather weird and politically orientated way of putting that communication power is handed over to the people. Yet, this is very effective when it comes to getting the message across.  Even more recently, François Laurent published a new book entitled marketing 2.0[Fr].  Marketing 2.0 is in fact the sequel to his influential blog: marketing is dead[Fr], but what is really striking is that François -- a former marketer at European consumer electronics manufacturer Thomson -- is more widely known as the president of one of the two French associations of marketing: Adetem.  Lastly Alain Thys is adding to the bargain by expostulating in his excellent marketing accountability presentation that marketing is not only dead but that it committed suicide in front of its shareholders, clients and even the earth!  Nothing less.

No doubt this time, things are moving ahead, even though the proportion of UGC is still low, there is an underlying trend of change, and this is not coming back to what it was before. As it is becoming more and more obvious to all that markets really are conversations there is this requirement for a growing number of enterprises to quickly be in sync with this evolution and gear up to community marketing.

An article by Rachel Meranus:

"Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks: Understanding the changing face of journalism can be the key to getting more coverage for your business" is providing insight in the media revolution which is unfolding before our very eyes. As a matter of fact, it enables us to connect all the dots and understand why the overall picture is changing, and not just business or journalism in isolation. Let's face it, this is a whole paradigm shift, one which was announced years ago  (by Don Tapscott actually, who co-authored Wikinomics last year) and is now happening on a large scale. So, what have we learnt?

On the one hand, there is "the changing face of journalism", which is now a fact and no longer a threat: Numerous layoffs, restructuring, new business models, advertising revenues going away.

There are no technical barriers and UGC (User-Generated Content) is a means  of direct communication vs top-down communication. Advertising was teaching lessons, UGC is about showing the way. Not just a new way of writing, but a whole new Pinko attitude related to client interaction.

The way people use information is different. Before, they sat down and information was sorted out and filtered out for them by papers. Now, Internet enables on demand information requests. RSS enables push ...

With e-commerce growth rates predicted to decline, online businesses wishing to outperform competition and gain market share, are increasingly required to invest in order to differentiate themselves, deploy richer and innovative applications and deliver more personal, compelling and engaging online user experiences. 

Scene7, part of Adobe Systems, released the results of a business survey entitled "Web 2.0 Experience 2008 and beyond", identifying and analysing how online businesses will be investing in order to enhance their customer experience. Key findings indicated that more than 50 percent plan to deploy new features and rich Internet enhancements including enhanced imagery, personalisation and user-generated content to their sites within the next six months, with 93 percent wishing to deploy an increasingly engaging customer experience by the end of the year. Mobile commerce, widget sharing, personalised messaging and user ratings & reviews were identified as the greatest growth areas for innovation. Other top-ranking features included 360-degree spin, zoom and alternative views, microsites, videos, blogs, RSS and product tours together with online catalogs and personalized stores that were ranked as equally effective. 

Increased clicks, usage and conversions (for 6 out of 10 Web site operators) together with revenue growth (for nearly half of them) and qualitative feedback were reported as critical effectiveness indicators for measuring the success of these enhancements and additional investments in these new functionalities. Other evaluation metrics included reduced abandonment rates (35.5%), increased repeat purchases (29.6%) and higher average order size (28.4%).

E-commerce is still just scraping the surface of its full potential. For further insight on this topic, I would highly recommend this excellent white paper from Scene7 which discusses historical factors that have brought the industry to its current state, identifies five key principles expected to guide the next phase of e-commerce, outlines barriers & considerations and discusses how leaders & innovators are now bringing some dramatic changes to win and differentiate in the next phase.

Preliminary questions

First and foremost, define the purpose of your corporate blog even before you start writing the first line.  What is the objective of this blog?  Is it about awareness?  Is it intended for you to share knowledge with the community?  Is it there to show that your corporation and its experts are particularly good at something?  If you are able to answer any of these questions, then you should also be able to clearly define the editorial line. Of course, it is possible to maintain a blog just to "talk about the weather". But at the end of the day, there are very little chance that this is going to benefit your corporation.  Eventually, not only  will this make your blog ineffective, but you may also run the risk of losing your management support.  It is particularly advised to target your blog as if it was a standard information vehicle, through a carefully chosen niche strategy.

It is also recommended to create a blog per activity, rather than one that mixes up different subjects.  This will increase the community effect and make it a lot more efficient.  Think about starting small rather than launch upfront as many blogs as you have domains that you're dealing with.  It is much more desirable to have two or three blogs which are successful rather than a hundred which are not.  Besides, don't forget that blogging could be time-consuming.

How much time should be devoted to that exercise?  And by whom?  This is probably the most crucial question.  If the blog depends on an individual then it can also become a mind-boggling question.  Very often, bloggers who do this for leisure, give up after a while or once they have moved to a more time-consuming job for instance and their free time vanishes or is considerably reduced.  This is one of the reasons why a lot of blogs disappear after roughly a year of activity. When it comes to corporate blogging, things are theoretically easier because experts are potentially plentiful and it is possible to pool expertise and form expert-teams so that experts aren't all busy at the same time. One can therefore establish rosters for the blog to be maintained on a regular basis by different people.  Even on the open Internet, this is one of the most effectual methods which I have found in order to keep the blog alive in the long run.

Writing in a blog is not very complex, but there are a few guidelines which should be respected as much as can be.  This list of Do's and Don'ts of corporate blogging can be treated as a Charter describing which rules to follow, and each expert should confirm that they are blogging according to these defined guidelines.

• One: Do not try and sell your products. Writing on the blog has to be natural and have to be closer to the spoken language. Avoid using cheap marketing arguments at all costs. Don't even think about listing the qualities or benefits of your products. A blog, let alone an expert blog, is not made for this, but to establish expertise and reputation.
• Two: Publish as much as you can. The more articles you will deliver, the greater your promotion on the web. A professional corporate blog which starts will only have a few articles referenced/indexed within Google, whereas an older blog or website will already have hundreds or more.
• Three: Avoid typos and spelling/grammar mistakes at all cost. This is a very common mistake. A lot of bloggers think that, because you're in a hurry, you don't have to worry so much about spelling or grammar. But this is a very bad habit. The writing has to be natural, which doesn't mean that it has to be bad. And if your articles are very pertinent and interesting but badly written, you will attract many impertinent and unpleasant comments. Being a corporation also helps as it should enable you to get others to proof read your text. However, I strongly recommend that you avoid rewriting expert text to give a communications flavour to it. This would be very unbecoming.
• ...

Introduction

Once your Corporate stakeholders have understood why Web 2.0 is more than a fad and why its marketing could benefit from it (Read our 15 golden rules for Web 2.0) and once they have established how their 2.0 strategy should be articulated (Refer to our interactivity matrix and 10 steps to 2.0 interactivity nirvana), quite a few questions remain: How to create a professional looking blog and how to promote it?  How long does it take every day and how many visitors may I expect? Where should my blog reside, should it be hosted or should I put it on my corporate server?  What should I do so that it is well indexed by Google and other search engines?  What are the do's and don'ts of Corporate blogging? What are the risks?...  These are some of the questions that we come across most of the time with regard to corporate blogging. In this article, we will spell out the steps which can lead to proficient Corporate Blogging and we'll try and address the above questions.

This can actually be used as corporate blogging guidelines for the perusal of your corporate blogging experts and your corporate blog managers.  You can even use this as a charter (namely the do's and don'ts chapter in part three) with which you would like them in their regular blogging exercise and also get them to agree to the rules of efficient and responsible corporate blogging.  A lot of the material enclosed in this article, is drawn from the experience of experience bloggers and Internet writers including myself who have been working in and around the Internet for many years (13 years in my case).

A few facts and figures:

Before you delve into the particulars of this methodology and blogging guidelines, we urge you to read the following lines which will serve as an explanation for the rest of the document:

• About 90% of blogs (90 not being the actual number but a ballpark figure) attract less than 50 visitors per day. Don’t raise your expectations too high mainly if your content is not up to scratch.
• User generated content is the era of empowered users who go on to the Internet hook up to a website and create a blog for free. Because you’re a corporation doesn’t mean that you own the best experts in the world on the subject that you want to deal with. Expect a lot from other bloggers who will have already started commenting on the subject. What about starting a journey by reading what has already been done?
• Blogging success is established in the long term: It can take a few years before you reach the top 10 of your category. As a consequence, forget about these people who will tell you that blogging is easy and that collaboration is effortless. This is just not true.
• Your expertise might be really good, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that your blog could attract hordes of visitors. A small crowd of enthusiasts is worth a million passive users.
• ...

I recently provided highlights on the role and impact of SaaS in a modernised IT environment and am trying to permanently observe the emergence of innovative offers that will bring the SaaS (r)evolution to its second and third steps. Over the last few months, I've been following RunMyProcess, an innovative European start-up who brings to the market a very interesting SaaS integration and aggregation platform. While recently discussing with Matthieu Hug, co-founder and Associate Director of RunMyProcess, how integration could potentially be a significant deterrent to effective adoption of SaaS solutions, I invited him to share his views on why SaaS is more than just another analysts' fantasy:

50% of the mergers & acquisitions deals fail because of IT. That's a pretty striking finding that should seriously question the way IT integration challenges are still being overlooked by many organisations. With such figures, it's needless to look for responsibilities within IT departments or to point out changing user needs. This simply reveals organisational failures, and as such, calls for a re-thinking of some of our IT habits: drop complexity, huge projects and the dream for a single, exhaustive system; focus on short time to market and agility; don't try to avoid errors and change but accept and manage them. Huge IT projects (calculated in thousands of man days) corresponds to what I would call a "pre-industrial" way of doing IT. Industrialisation is not about becoming complex and large, it's about answering more needs, better and faster. Hopefully, IT's "industrial revolution" is upcoming, and it's called "Software-as-a-Service".

There are at least 3 reasons to back such an affirmation: 

SaaS changes fundamentally the economics of IT. In a traditional IT department, the very large majority of the activity is usually focused on operations and maintenance, with business innovation representing a fairly small percentage of the overall IT budget. SaaS removes the need for large software and hardware investments and maintenance costs, and places the technical operations under the responsibility of the SaaS vendor. Overall, this allows IT to concentrate on business operations and innovation. 

SaaS is the way to a Darwinian IT environment, where unused solutions disappear from your landscape immediately. Changing the service you use has a limited cost, changing a product you bought is plain money lost; when analysts reckon that more than 50% of bought softwares are never even put into production, this is more than a marginal gain. In simple terms, this simply means that SaaS vendors are doomed to excellence or death: that's good news for the customers.

SaaS blurs the frontier between software and business service. How simple is it with traditional IT to add a new customer scoring functionality to a CRM system? Or to make an external partner participate to your core processes? In a SaaS oriented environment, there is simply no difference between the CRM service and a scoring service. Similarly, your customers' or suppliers' IT is a set of business services, which are not really different from the software or online services you subscribe to.

Overall this will drive corporate IT beyond the walls of the enterprise: future IT value will come from seamlessly linking and integrating legacy systems, B2B partners, online softwares and individual business services. There are obviously a couple of technical requirements allowing a seamless integration between applications, mainly around SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) for legacy systems. But that's far from enough to get an operational "extended IT". Think of IT as an orchestra, where each "service" (being online software, legacy SOA, B2B services,etc) is a musician with its instrument, and where business users write down a changing partition. A single pianist can play a sonata but a symphony is out of its range; and as the number of musicians increases, they can't play the music alone: you desperately need a conductor. 

Similarly, you will naturally use several services, and thus you need to orchestrate them. Indeed, one of the most important requirements of the extended IT, services and web oriented architecture, is around the orchestration of all these services, or "integration" of them all in IT terms. Besides, this orchestration should be easy to set up and modify, controlled by business people rather than techies, and avoid software development as much as possible. Last but not least, the tools that allow to design and run this orchestration are only making sense if these are SaaS platform themselves (eg online and usage based). To use acronyms, such platforms are often called SaaS Integration Platform (SIP) or Internet Service Bus (ISB). 

SaaS is an opportunity to take into consideration for one of IT's most complex reality: quickly evolving business needs. A good SIP is the tool that leverages this opportunity and should be kept simple and ready to use.

Thanks to Matthieu Hug, co-founder and Associate Director of RunMyProcess for this contribution.

It occurred to me in the past few weeks that there was some kind of missing link in the evolutionary state of the twenty first century corporation towards interactivity. As expressed in an earlier article entitled "15 golden rules for web 2.0", there is a strong requirement for large enterprises to launch interactive marketing initiatives - be they called 2.0, pinko marketing or anything else for that matter - not just because of the buzz word but because there is growing consciousness of the need to engage in better, less top-down discussions with one's clients. The whole world is awash with concepts like wikinomics (past posts on this subject) and co-marketing, but the real issue is not about whether this is required but in fact, how to make the rubber meet the road.

And that's where the missing link is to be found. There is the concept and even the urgent need on the one hand, and, on the other hand, there is a handful of complex, esoteric tools which managers have heard of but rarely grasp. At the end of the day there is nothing really complex about a blog or an ideagora, but you can't blame someone whose responsibility is business, who has never worked on an interactive website to come up with clear answers about questions he only discovered a while ago. So this is where we have a role to play, where our ability to bridge the gap between IT and business can actually make a difference ...

Illustration by Yann Gourvennec

As announced in a previous post, this is part one of my analysis of e-mail (mis)usage in the workplace. I have also inserted my recommendations for productivity enhancement for each of the worst practice items which I have described. This is obviously not meant to be a comprehensive list. Feel free to add comments to this post and add items.

Introduction: We have all become ‘anoraks'

In the Internet world e-mail can be considered one of the oldest web-related applications together with the late Gopher and newsnet. But e-mail per se already existed in pre-Internet era. As far as I am concerned, I have been a user and observer of e-mail usage since its inception in the late 1980's when I was working for one of the leading IT providers of that time. That IT provider made the decision to extend the usage of e-mail (then in proprietary format) to the entirety of the company's users (i.e. 125,000 users across 35 countries but sadly enough far fewer today).  The main issue with electronic mail at the time was about the requirement to make all employees including managers actually use it, the latter being rather reluctant. Indeed, many of them had difficulties coming to terms with the fact that their status was no hindrance to using the tool by themselves (many couldn't associate typing with manager status, at the time it used to be secretarial work only).  We were number 3 in the IT world at the time, but it didn't make any difference in fact, strangely enough. All this to show our younger readers how far we've travelled in terms of IT usage since such prehistoric times.

A little less than 10 years after, the Internet revolution was making IT a cornerstone of work efficiency not only in businesses, but also schools, not to name the entertainment revolution in the home. In business, it has now virtually become impossible to name any profession not resorting to IT for their normal day to day operations. Luddites are now few and far between. To an extent, we have all become nerds. So much so that IT has now become just one more of our working tools, just like pen and paper, the mobile phone and other tools, just an ordinary tool, and no longer a subject for nerds/anoraks to discuss amongst themselves using incomprehensible three letter acronyms.

However, despite the fact that IT has become ubiquitous, and even in spite of the Internet in particular, can we venture to say that we are all using it properly? In fact, there are many signs showing us that we are not. E-mail usage (be it in the business world or even on the open Internet) is very often inadequate, and can even be the source of conflicts in more in many ways.

Besides, e-mail usage has to face up to new and increasingly worrying problems: exponential rise of spamming, e-mail overflow, e-mail addiction through devices like blackberry and other mobile Internet devices, not to name viruses. What I'm proposing here is an analysis of e-mail usage, its good and bad practices, and the strategies that are required in order to protect oneself from the side-effects of bad e-mail usage, and also more positively, positive strategies for better using this tool.

By Dr. Lee Schlenker

Although IT vendors can proudly claim that computer technology is nearly ubiquitous in business today, many managers remain quite sceptical of the ability of software solutions to help them learn about the different realities of business practice. In spite of constant technological "innovation", many clients rightfully question whether any supplier is able to deliver business applications that makes as much sense to their "end-users" as it does to their IT department. As an initial contribution to this blog on Marketing & Innovation, let me set out here some of the foundations that I will try to develop in the months to come. After having listened to hundreds of managers in diverse industries throughout Europe, the Middle East and Asia, we have the firm conviction that IT is essentially a conversation, and individual markets for IT can best be understood as stories with multiple voices.  This view may help explain why many operational managers feel that value of software depends less on its ability to incorporate global best practices than its ability to accurately reflect local visions, contexts and experience. In this era of  "anywhere, anytime, anyplace", the ambition of this blog in the coming months will be  to explore  IT frameworks  that amplify these voices to strengthen future success stories of business.

Introduction

This article was originally designed to address the questions which were sent to me by large customers wanting to launch Web 2.0 initiatives.  Very often, these clients wanted to jump on the bandwagon, but didn't know how to do it.  They required help and guidance, even to understand the very meaning of Web 2.0.

Evaluating what should be done as part of such Web 2.0 initiatives with large organisations implies that we rethink the definition of Web 2.0 (see O'Reilly's Web 2.0 meme map to start with). An executive summary of this definition is provided hereafter. More than often, we have noticed that the main motivation for large corporations to jump on the bandwagon is to keep up with the Joneses.

In this article, we will describe the key principles and main reasons why you should or should not opt for a Web 2.0 initiative.  Large organisations are getting increasingly interested in launching 2.0 initiatives. To a certain extent, we can relate that to the fact that an increasing number of success stories are relayed by the press and that most of them are related to impressive buzz marketing operations, which are seemingly easy to replicate.  The entire world is full of the concept of Web 2.0, so the idea is often not to miss the opportunity to do something about it. All of this is very tempting and hard to resist.  However, companies should never launch 2.0 websites just for the sake of it.

Indeed, it requires a lot of forward thinking about what one is trying to achieve and how it fits in the overall strategy.  To a certain extent, what we are witnessing today with Web 2.0 is not very far from what we have witnessed in the 1990s, when large corporations wanted to launch their first websites.  More than often, the same question prevails: that is to say, is this website going to support or jeopardise my brand.

How can you tell a website is 2.0-ready?

There are several characteristics of Web 2.0, which are described hereafter:

• Human characteristics
  • Collective intelligence: this is a concept which was developed by Howard Rheingold. This concept implies that when a group is cooperating, the result of this cooperation is stronger than the sum of all the contributions from all the individuals which are part of this group.
  • The user is the producer: With Web 2.0, users are also producers not just spectators. Web 2.0 sites are definitely alien to advertising and communications. Ignoring that and pursuing the old habit of delivering pre-formatted top-down product-orientated messages would be a non-starter.
• Functional characteristics:
  • RSS: RSS is more than just a feature, it has a real functional impact on user behaviour. RSS (Real Simple Syndication) enables users to receive information without having to make any effort to collect it. The use of RSS feeds imposes that the user installs a feed reader. More and more, these the readers are integrated within the Internet browser or within the Internet toolbar (Google, Yahoo, etc.). The exponential development of RSS is at last making it possible to push information towards the user as was originally designed at the end of the 1990's.
• Technical characteristics:
  • Thin clients, light programming and mash-ups: the basic idea is that Web 2.0 websites can be built very rapidly by using existing objects or even objects and pieces of code or data drawn from existing websites. These existing websites can also be external. A typical mash-up example is that of websites which use Internet maps (mainly from Google), in order to make geo-localisation possible.
  • The Web as a platform: this is the recycling of the '€˜old' (2000+) ASP concept (Application Service Provision). The idea is to use the network as a repository, and to avoid thick clients (see previous paragraph).

  • 

There are risks associated with adopting any new technology, and Enterprise 2.0 is no different. Enterprise 2.0 holds the promise of dramatically increasing business productivity, stimulating greater innovation, and creating tighter connections between employees, as well as with partners, suppliers and customers. While these technologies and other social networking softwares are facilitating knowledge sharing, accelerating team communications, fostering increased collaboration and online communities creation, many executives are recognising their value but worry about losing control of information, compromising sensitive data, opening  their networks to security breaches or even exposing employees to time-killing “network noise". 

Liability for potentially illegal activity involving workers, risk of malware infections, bandwidth constraints and other drop-offs in employee productivity are obvious reasons why the "open social Internet" just goes against the instincts of many Chief Information Officers. 

It is also true that employees using these systems for group collaboration, usually operate outside the approved IT applications, meaning they aren't actually subject to enterprise policies governing compliance and information protection. It is obviously a challenge for any IT professional to give up control over the IT systems they depend on. As Enterprise 2.0 is decentralised and ad hoc, control is in the hands of users rather than the IT department. 

Security risk - either incoming, as malware, or outgoing, as data leakage - is probably the biggest issue with Enterprise 2.0 technology since opening up your company to share information and allowing users to upload files to your system - while a laudable idea for improved collaboration- surely expose your infrastructure to related threats. An open social system makes it a challenge to maintain security. 

Additionally, many managers may be concerned about the risks associated with bad publicity or confidential data disseminated due to employees potentially sharing information on blogs or other social networking sites. Lots of companies are spending large lump of money creating their message, maintaining its consistency and build a brand. Opening up the conversation means, for better or worse, that you will be losing control of that message, at least in ways it was previously defined. While there are benefits related to opening up the conversation, not all content or opinions are created equal and some may be more valuable than others. Community policing are therefore also required to provide the necessary checks and balances to potentially eliminate noise. 

Some concerns could be addressed by providing tools and dashboards, giving control over these conversations as well as which employees can access and use which tools. While this could help allay IT fears, it may still be difficult for some to accept this cultural shift without some assurance that critical business systems will keep operating. The first rule of thumb for improving security protection and securing risks is considering people and process alongside with technologies including "next-generation" capabilities such as web filtering technologies, reputation services, blended threat protection and behaviour-based detection. IT professionals are highly required to think about security implications and ensure appropriate safeguards are taken as their companies adopt Enterprise 2.0 techniques. These technologies are indeed enabling information to move in new faster ways, with users being so much more involved, putting networks, employees, and customers at risk. 

As businesses rush to get involved in Web 2.0, a Forrester research study recently revealed that the vast majority of organisations adopt Enterprise 2.0 technologies without even preparing to fend off the related threats and dealing with the security risks that come along with it. The report indeed found that 97 percent of companies surveyed considered themselves prepared, though 68 percent conceded there was room for improvement. Even scarier, a full 90% of surveyed IT professionals and security decision makers reported that they are at the least "very concerned" about related threats and may have made the leap into these technologies without thinking about the security consequences. The study further notes a lack of risk awareness, user training and consistent policies, making essential for organisations to re-examine the adequacy of security policies and protection mechanisms together with implementing systematic and comprehensive training to communicate the magnitude and extent of web threats to users. 

Finally, as with any disruptive technology, a critical success factor resides in the fact that companies will need to assess the strategic value and implementation plans with an eye toward enterprise requirements including reliability, security, governance, compliance, and privacy. As companies dive into Enterprise 2.0, associated risks such as security, infrastructure stability, data loss or reliability, just to name a few, are increasingly important to secure. Nevertheless, in most cases, the benefits provided to enterprises considering the new social media technologies as a collaboration platform, may outweigh the risks, especially if some precautions are taken to mitigate these.

We recently touched on the subjects of the many forms of web marketing tactics that could potentially be utilised as part of your digital marketing arsenal as well as the effectiveness and increased use of these online tools. So while we are on the topic of integrating innovative techniques into your marketing plan, let's consider this from a broader, more strategic perspective, rather than a pure tactical point of view.

I echo Larry Weber, global communications entrepreneur, that "The customer is in control" or "Web 2.0 will change marketing as we know it" could be considered as neo-platitudes. I would simply argue that few marketing professionals, even if growing by the day, embrace these new concepts and adapt their marketing approach accordingly.

An excellent excerpt from his recent book "Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business" is highlighting 12 steps to the interactive future that marketers should take to recalibrate their efforts and change their mindsets on how to improve their marketing effectiveness. This 12-step approach is a great way to organise your thinking about the differences between the traditional marketing of yesterday and the new marketing of today and tomorrow, and includes the following recommendations:

1- Change your marketing mindset: The new marketing of today and tomorrow is about being more transparent, earning trust and building credibility. It's about nurturing relationships and dialogue among customers.

2- Make your brand come alive: In the new marketing reality, a brand is a living, changing thing. The brand is based on the dialogue you develop with your customers and prospects. What makes the social Web so important is that it enables companies to have this kind of dialogues more efficiently and less expensively than ever before. Companies should now gauge brand equity by dynamic measures such as customer word-of-mouth rather than static metrics such as brand recall. 

3- Out with the old segmentation: With the advent of the social Web, the new marketing means segmenting by customers' behaviour, attitudes and interests so that you can target them with marketing activities that are actually meaningful to them. 

4- Target by behaviour: One of the big changes happening is a swing away from one-to-one targeting, leading to targeting customers by behaviour. Behavioural targeting will become more widespread and is expected to increase ten-fold over the next five years. It will allow marketers to offer more personalised customer experiences, whilst consumers gain from more relevant advertising and content as they have been targeted based on their online footprint. 

5- Communicate Interactively: Communication is less about creating and delivering contained & controlled messages (as in the old marketing) and more about creating compelling environments to which customers are attracted. Web 2.0 actually creates the platform of true interactivity. 

6- Embrace Consumer Content: In the new marketing, the best Web site will combine professional and user-generated content, contributed by customers and prospects who are initiating and continuing the dialogue. 

7- Spread the right virus: Companies should develop solid viral marketing, a strategy that does more than simply attract attention to itself, so that word of mouth generates content-based virality. 

8- Accept customer reviews: The difficulty in the movement toward the social Web is the natural instinct of marketers and corporate culture to control the message and the customer. It's difficult to give up control completely, but realise that reviews, as user-generated content, serve to demonstrate your company's transparency. 

9- Leave paper behind: The new marketing will be collateral-free, with material that is more compelling, customised, visual and up-to-date. Information can be a powerful customer relationship tool, but doesn't have to be printed. 

10- Invert your strategy: Strategy has traditionally been imposed from the top down. It is now required to consider it in a bottom up approach. As marketers, it is increasingly important to learn from the people who are really paying attention to our products and services: the customers. 

11- Let users decide: With the social Web, information has to be available on demand, when and how users want it. Marketing is, in essence, truly becoming an investment in your brand's future growth and profitability. 

12- Let the people pay: In the new marketing, customers want to be in charge of their own payment options which must be fast and easy.

Today, marketing is exploding with possibilities but also complexities as it reaches out into new forms of communication channels and increasingly engaging media. Marketers have an exceptional opportunity to use these new tools to reach their audience, even in a fragmented world. It is becoming essential for marketers to understand the context of the "new marketing", and prioritise what they need to do to develop customer engagement, build communities and maximise profit in a time of marketing confusion. Online and interactive marketing initiatives should indeed be considered as an effective divergence from traditional marketing mediums as marketers have the opportunity to engage customers in a "conversation" that is not just steered toward standardised product messaging.

When you think about it, marketing's role has not changed. It has always been, and will always be, about acquiring new customers, managing effectively customer relationships, selling more to current customers while developing their loyalty, analysing the effectiveness of marketing activities and providing better customer service. But be prepared, the techniques that were successful in the past may become less and less effective in the future. This is where a new marketing mindset is required!

Got your marketing plan ready for 2008?

Let me first ask you this simple question since you would be surprised (or not) to discover that a startling 40% of marketing professionals don't even have a formal marketing plan. Surprisingly, not everyone develops a plan - even though most will agree that it is the foundation to successful and effective marketing.

If, on the other hand, you are not among that 40%, you and your team likely have a 2008 digital marketing plan devised by now. But are you confident that this plan can boost your sales and exceed your goals? Did you organize your marketing efforts to deliver maximum results quickly and efficiently? Have you actually developed the roadmap enabling you to leverage online marketing techniques in order to supercharge your sales and marketing efforts in 2008? 

In many instances, your product and services will lend themselves to a variety of online marketing tactics, many of which are extremely well suited to reach your intended audience and highlight the value of your offer. One of the key advantages of online marketing is indeed the ability to utilise effective low-cost techniques that are typically easy to implement and are highly effective at producing, capturing, and capitalising on inbound traffic in a very cost-effective manner.

Jeremiah Owyang, Web Strategist, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research and leading social media blogger has recently released an excellent article: "A Complete List of the Many Forms of Web Marketing for 2008" which catalogs no less than 36 tools and tactics available for corporate web strategy CMOs, VPs and Directors of Web and Marketing. I would highly recommend that anyone looking to come to grips with the multiple ways by which the Web can deliver effective and impactful ways of addressing the market, spend a few minutes working through this exhaustive list. You are very likely to come up with a few new ideas and identify the relevant opportunities that would be worth exploring and testing as part of your 2008 digital marketing plan.

I do agree with Jeremiah that being aware of the drastic changes that occurred in our digital landscape is critical and require organisations to adapt and evolve. As stated by the author, this list is not prioritised and should simply be considered as an index of tools that is not a substitute for a strategy or a plan. 

Once your marketing objectives are identified and your plan developed, only should you then choose the most appropriate tools in order to use the Internet to its maximum effect. From my perspective, the secret is usually residing in how you will be handling the customer experience, using various appropriate communication channels and online tactics in order to engage with the prospect, generate interest, develop the relationship and finally generate (repeated) sales. Experience as shown that efficiency and “creativity” (ie. creative ways of using these communication channels) is mainly coming from the intelligent way you will be combining and using strategically various marketing tactics; cost-effectively mixing traditional ways of addressing your target audience with more innovative ways of engaging with your customers.

As online techniques take on a larger role in marketing strategies, I will be publishing shortly key findings from a survey conducted on marketers from around the world, showing how online tools are being used, which ones are the most effective and on which ones companies plan to spend more. So subscribe to my feed and stay tuned ...

Well, 2008 has arrived, along with the New Year's resolutions and the ever-present pundit predictions. Now that we're on the other side of the New Year, I thought I would share my thoughts on what I feel should be one of the companies' top priorities - and probably their number 1 resolution for this year: Efficiently managing their online reputation.

Every day, a blogger or forum member is discussing something important to your business, being your company’s brand, your key executives, your competitors or your industry. They may be hyping your company and building positive buzz for your products or criticizing your services, complaining to others about the poor quality of your customer service. When you think about it, companies aren't just potentially facing negative consumer buzz. Criminals are starting to blackmail corporations by threatening to attack their reputations online and competitors can also get online and cause trouble.

Managing online reputation is fast becoming a growing problem for businesses. With the rise of social media and user-generated content, online reputation is not just a matter of tracking influential blogs. Millions of people can alter the content of popular sites, anonymous people can post rumours on obscure chat sites and popular consumer rating sites. The Internet has quickly become a complex ecosystem where public opinion can be created and disseminated within seconds. Keeping your eyes and ears on the world of consumer generated media can be a daunting task for any company. Blogs, forums, wikis and social networks gain popularity every day and without a plan to monitor and manage your company’s online reputation, you could be at risk.

A business's reputation will be based on an almost infinite amount of information sources. The Internet is a huge database of unstructured information. When everyone is a publisher, the likelihood of libel increases a millionfold. Accountability has fallen by the wayside."
Toby Bell, Research Vice President at Gartner, Inc.

A great brand can take months, if not years, and millions of dollars to build. It should be the thing you hold most precious and managing your business’s online reputation is key to owning your brand. Many enterprises are only just starting to understand the importance of online reputation management. It is fast becoming critical for marketing and communication, legal counsel, corporate risk management and the line of business alike to really understand how to better monitor, manage and measure online reputation and to remedy problems faster when they occur. There are so many conversations out there that there is simply no effective manual way to identify them all, to figure out whether there is something to take action on, to react to or promote. Companies should therefore create policies and adopt technologies that can help analyse what is being said about them on the Internet and respond to conversations that can damage their reputations.

The proliferation of social media on the web empowers consumers to become influential, opinion-wielding publishers but also enables businesses to take the pulse of consumers as it pertains to their brands. There are a handful of emerging vendors including Reputica, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Andiamo Systems, Market Sentinel or Visible Technologies to name a few, that offer services and technologies to help you monitor, protect, nurture and build a stellar reputation for your business. These solutions will help you gain a comprehensive understanding of what your customers are saying about your products & services, and proactively identify issues that have the potential to affect the reputation of your company, image or brand. You will be able to gain control of crisis situations with up-to-the-minute intelligence that helps you pinpoint the consumer state of mind on issues that can include product recalls, liability issues, consumer activism, negative publicity, corporate issues, news events, rumours or situations you never expected. Advanced monitoring, relevance detection, filtering, classification, sentiment & concept mining, modelling and scoring techniques as well as visualisation technologies will also enable you to leverage candid public conversations so you’re in the best possible position to repair your relationship with customers, stakeholders, regulators, the media, the public and other groups. 

But reputation management should not only be limited to large organisations. Companies of all sizes have competition and are experiencing the new reality of Internet-enabled consumers who are creating and sharing their experiences, opinion and content online. The MarketingPilgrim website published a great list of twenty six free "buzz tracking" tools that can be used to monitor your company reputation, track news that relate to your industry or even spy on your competition! ... well worth checking out.

Now is the time to take control of your online reputation and maintain, enhance & protect your brand identity ... No more excuses!

With only a few days left before 2008 hits us, I thought it was the perfect timing to dive into what Saugatuck Technology just reported as being their SaaS predictions. Their recent research alert highlights five key trends in SaaS for 2008 and beyond:

  SaaS platforms and marketplaces will begin to proliferate, becoming a significant channel opportunity for vendors, as well as a key means by which users will gain access to SaaS solution capabilities. During the past several years, SaaS marketplaces and platforms have evolved well beyond their initial capabilities, offering customisation, integration, data pipes for BI or data sharing, data storage, content management, workflow, development tools and APIs. Ecosystems have formed to enrich the value of their offerings through the synergy of functionality brought together on these platforms. SaaS platforms now express a wide range of capabilities that are driven by the business model of the ecosystem and the needs and characteristics of the marketplaces they enable.

  SaaS is becoming an international phenomenon, driven by both local demand as well as large multi-nationals who are adopting SaaS business solutions on a global basis. While US SaaS adoption is clearly going “mainstream”, Europe and Asia are only now beginning to experience the steep adoption ramp that the US has witnessed over the past two years. Europe is beginning to go through a very similar adoption profile that the US has – albeit with an 18 month lag. A very strong European growth can be anticipated for US-based SaaS giants aggressively expanding into this region as well as regional and country-specific players. Whereas average US market growth rates will likely slow into the 35-40 percent range in 2008, European market growth rates should exceed 60-70 percent next year.

  SaaS merger & acquisition activity will explode. No doubt a serious feeding frenzy is about to unfold and it could be anticipated that a large number of venture-backed start-ups and emerging SaaS companies in the $5 million - $20 million range would be put up for sale over the next 12-18 months – and acquired by either SaaS pure-plays, ISVs hungry to enter the SaaS fray or on-shore & off-shore IT services and BPO providers who are eager to leverage a SaaS model. The upcoming year is an important one where next-generation horizontal and vertical franchises will be cemented.

  Traditional on-premise application ISVs will earnestly begin to fight back. Approximately 15-20 percent of ISVs have already either begun new skunk works initiatives or gained access to SaaS assets and development experience through M&A activity. However, over the next 12-24 months, this number is anticipated to rise dramatically, as a tougher economic climate will only exacerbate an already challenged on-premise and traditional perpetual license model. To be successful, ISVs will need to fully understand the journey that they will be on across five key dimensions – economic, technological, operational, organisational and cultural – as well as take advantage of the many best practices available based on the hard-fought experience of early adopters.

  SaaS development platforms will evolve and 2008 will see explosive growth in the adoption and use of SaaS-based software development platforms and services, beginning with significant growth in the use of vendor-specific, application-specific, and marketplace/ecosystem-specific development platforms and services. Wide availability of open, standardised tools and technologies in subscription-based, on-demand environments will help streamline and reduce the costs of software development and customisation. It will also foster use and growth of services-oriented architecture development strategies.

 

Other insights and Strategic Planning Positions provided by the research include the following predictions:

  By 2012, 30 percent or more of all new business software will be deployed and delivered as SaaS. 15 percent of SaaS solution revenue will be accessed through SaaS marketplaces. At least 75 percent of the revenue generated by SaaS marketplaces will be driven by five or fewer SaaS platform providers.

  By YE2008, greater than 55 percent of North American-based businesses will have deployed at least one SaaS application, with Western European close behind at greater than 40 percent. 

  60 percent or more of SaaS firms funded prior to 2005 will either be acquired or go out of business by 2010. By 2012, all bets are off as it concerns traditional on-premise licensing schemas.

  By 2010, 40 percent of traditional on-premise application ISVs will bring to market SaaS solution offerings, either via acquisition, development of new single-instance multi-tenant applications, or through virtualised (multi-tenant) versions of their traditional on-premise offerings. Less than half of the ISVs in transition will actually succeed.

  By YE2008, the number of user enterprises taking advantage of SaaS-based software development platforms, services and offerings will number in the tens of millions worldwide. 

 

These important trends will no doubt shape how the SaaS applications and business services sector will evolve, including changes to how vendors will go to market, as well as how customers will gain value from SaaS solutions.

 

Recommended reading for further insight on this topic:

  Total economic impact of Software-as-a-Service: The foundation of a sound technology investment

  Europe poised for SaaS explosive growth

  SaaS Beyond the Tipping Point: Three Waves, Four Key Management Challenges, Five Strategic Planning Positions

  SaaS: The staying power of this new breed of Web-based software

As firms look to focus on core business processes, software-as-a-service (SaaS) provides an increasingly attractive alternative. Companies of all sizes are weighing advantages of SaaS which has emerged as an important deployment option in customer relationship management (CRM) but is also eliciting interest in other areas such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), security or backup just to name a few.

The key cost drivers for any software implementation are the cost of the software application, the hardware required to run the system and the people services required to design, deploy, manage, maintain and support the application. Nevertheless, in addition to typical cost drivers (such as capital expenses, design and deployment costs, ongoing infrastructure, operations, training and support costs), companies also need to look at intangible costs when completing a TCO analysis. Some of the intangible cost factors that affect TCO include reliability and availability, interoperability, extensibility, security, scalability, capacity and opportunity costs.   

The difference in pricing and operating models between traditional software and SaaS application options can make an apples-to-apples total cost of ownership (TCO) comparison “tricky”. A white paper, produced by the SaaS Executive Council of the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), "Software-as-a-Service; A Comprehensive Look at the Total Cost of Ownership of Software Applications" helps in better understanding the different cost drivers and includes a simplified calculator that will help decision makers to better estimate the true TCO of a SaaS versus traditional software deployment. 

But companies evaluating both SaaS and traditional on-premise options, must look beyond the pure cost trade-offs. Often, differences in business benefits, flexibility, and risk are as important, if not more important, when comparing options. Historically, choosing an enterprise application, or assessing the benefits of existing systems began and often ended with analyses of the costs to implement, deploy, and maintain them. However, a pure cost-oriented approach like total cost of ownership does not allow an organisation to measure the full economic impact of the investment. By measuring not just cost and financial benefits, but also risk or uncertainty as well as future flexibility, companies can establish a more inclusive and accurate picture of the return on investment (ROI). 

By using Forrester's Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) methodology, an organisation's decision will be better aligned with business needs, project success rates will increase, risks will be better understood and mitigated, and business growth will be accelerated. A report entitled "Comparing The ROI Of SaaS Versus On-Premise Using Forrester’s TEI™ Approach" discusses SaaS-specific issues across the four dimensions included in Forrester's Total Economic Impact™ model to provide a framework for the economic evaluation of a SaaS option. This document establishes criteria for a robust ROI analysis that is used to evaluate opportunities in vendor selection, consolidation, upgrade/migration, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) deployment scenarios.

In addition to the ROI analysis, every major technology initiative should be accompanied by a business case. The business case lays out the reasons for the investment, the expected benefits of the initiative, the costs to make it happen, an analysis of risks, and future options that are created. It documents the relevant facts and situational analysis, key metrics, financial analysis, project timelines, and demonstrates the business imperatives for initiating and funding the project.

There are risks and challenges associated with adopting any new technology, and Enterprise 2.0 is no different. 

It is quickly becoming evident that successful implementation is arising from business strategy, aligned with clearly defined outcomes & objectives, and supported by organisational structures, company's culture and adapted technologies. Like any other project, it requires thought, preparation, support, energy, and communication.

A lot of companies are currently planning their web 2.0 strategies and are discovering the opportunities as well as facing the challenges of adopting these technologies in the workplace.

This “ZDNet At the Whiteboard” video entitled “Web 2.0 at Work” is examining the pain points of implementing Web 2.0 tools at work, and offers a strategy as well as key considerations for a successful deployment and adoption.

The business case, system adoption and issues around fragmentation are typical pain points that companies are dealing with as far as Enterprise 2.0 implementation is concerned. Making this type of initiative a success requires aligning the following critical aspects: senior management commitment and involvement, internal communication, company’s culture and organisational change, providing incentives and recognition, and finally selecting the appropriate infrastructure. Effective Enterprise 2.0 platforms should operate across silos, directly relate to clearly identified critical business processes and reach out to customers, employees as well as suppliers and partners for maximum collaboration, innovation and adoption.