Enterprise 2.0 in Boston defines the new Social Workplace

After spending the past 3 days attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference it has become even clearer in my mind that social media and social networking has an important part to play in the future of enterprise collaboration but requires a great deal more education and understanding by the key decision makers. We need to spend more time understanding the use cases and cultural challenges of creating social wrappers around corporate information and seeding these inside corporate social networks, its not about replacing email as much as empowering your employees to connect with people, customers and partners in a way that's more socially engaging. Its important to remember that if we are to learn anything from the adoption success of web flavoured social content its that its not about IT or technology - its about user experience. The companies who put user experience above IT and Technology will create a competitive advantage by attracting the best employees who can be far more productive while still ensuring that content and information is secure.

Another key challenge is going to be scalability and enterprise standards for social collaboration platforms in the workplace not to forget the compliant and secure nature of content management required in many sectors such as government, banking and legal.

It seems that the social workplace is going to be an increasingly important evolution for business but we are still in the very early days of understanding the key use cases and value propositions experienced by the social marketplace through web 2.0 but what is clear will be the requirement to have far better methods of sharing information and working in virtual dispersed teams, email is not dead yet but we must find better communication methods like micro-blogging, video sharing and social bookmarking if we are ever going to be able to work effectively in the digital world.

Winning Advantages of Social Media in the Marketplace

I was recently asked to help describe the competitive advantages of social media for the salesforce and how they can get the most out of these connected networks. I felt it was important to identify the best practice and ethics of using social media as described below. Would be great your thoughts, ideas and success stories of using social media is this way.

- which are the best social media for salespeople to use?/ - how can they get the most out of them?

LinkedIn is the best and most obvious choice as it really delivers all the key ingredients a sales person needs, customers name, contact details, company, work history and specific business sector. The best way to interact with any social media tool is to be subtle, offer input and make it worthwhile to other people in the group so they want to interact with you.

One of the key areas you should look to focus on in LinkedIn is the professional groups. LinkedIn gives the user the ability to create professional groups focusing on the specific business or technology they are involved in. Sales people should focus on finding the groups that are most relevant to their business and what they are trying to sell, then start interacting with these groups and communities , offering engaging conversation, recent research, industry statistics and any tips or hints that may be helpful. This shows you are offering value to the community and they are more likely to interact and eventually engage with your product or service. By using the professional groups it allows the sales person to be able to target their specific areas of interest and build up trusted relationships with people. By being useful, relevant and engaging in your network it will build trust over time and create a strong networking opportunities for you over the long run.

Another application , which is fast becoming a must have for sales teams is XOBNI or inbox backwards. Basically it is a plug in which links to your outlook so when you receive an email from a potential lead for example, it automatically pulls together their information from LinkedIn, Facebook and shows their network of contacts in real time . It also links into Hoovers the business information site and can give details on the company’s current performance.

Essentially it aggregates all the key business and social content available about the lead/customer who emailed and delivers it to you in a simple, concise visual way allowing the user to gain key areas of knowledge instantaneously without the need to search the web for hours. This information can then be used to develop a more all rounded pitch.

Facebook is a tricky one as it can be beneficial, but only really if you know the customer very well and want to invite them more into your personal world. I look at LinkedIn as inviting someone into your office, you don’t need to know them well, it’s just business. However, Facebook is more like inviting someone into your home or for a barbeque in the garden. If you feel you have that level of friendship with the customer then Facebook can be a good tool to reinforce these relationships. It’s not really an effective tool for sourcing new leads

Twitter is a buzz word at the moment and rightly so as it’s fast becoming one of the most exciting forms of social and broadcast communication. However, I think people are still unsure of how best to use it in the world of sales. Where I’ve seen it being used successfully is a tool to gain tacit knowledge about past, present and potential customers and prospects . By following customer’s on Twitter you gain access to their interests, likes and dislikes and build a profile around the person thus giving you key information that will help with potential pitches etc. You can also setup key words searches on Twitter for example if you are a seller of enterprise software you can have this as a key search term and Twitter will alert you to conversations which include this term. This allows you to see what people are saying about the product, their pain points and what they want out of their software. You can then use this information to filter who’d be looking for new software and to find out if they are unhappy with their current supplier. Again its important to point out that Twitter is a broadcast channel where you need to build up trusted followers to be effective so its increasingly important to add value and share information or knowledge which will help your community which in turn helps you build leads and opportunities.

- what are the pitfalls to look out for?

The key pitfall in social media is when people look at it the same way as say cold calling. You need to be subtle, engaging and relevant you can’t just jump in and start selling. Social media is very unforgiving and if the group your are connected to feels you are spamming them or adding no intrinsic value they will block you straight away. I like to look at it as if you were trying to sell something to a group of friends down the pub. The topic has to be initially engaging on a social level, be contextual and then slowly deliver the sales message. They want to feel like they are getting something out of it not just being sold to.


- What examples are there of companies using social media to sell?

I actually have been following the Dell social media campaign via twitter and must say they have done an incredible job off communicating useful and product based content without being overly commercial, tweets have been engaging and I have shared offers and deals with friends and family which I would never normally have been aware off.

The DellOutlet now has over 15,000 followers who are receiving marketing messages from Dell via Twitter. Dell has now taken its Twitter campaign to a new level but offering discounts exclusively to the 11,844 people who follow @DellOutlet . For instance, there is a Tweet with a link to save 20% on Outlet Latitude™ XT tablet PC. When you click on the link, it takes you to this product page on Dell.com. http://forwebsake.blogspot.com/2008/12/dell-claim-twitter-contributed-to-over.html

Another great example would be Zappos, a US based shoe company who have managed to build a massive following of customers on Twitter and actively encourage their employees to blog and engage with customers - they have proved that empowering their employees with the tools to connect with customer through social media can turn a relatively unknown shoe website into a massively profitable business. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/zappos_twitter.php

The social marketplace builds customer engagement and loyalty...

The Traditional Marketplace is changing…

Would it be fair to say that we are experiencing a major shift from traditional advertising methods? From television, radio and traditional publications, brand and content is expressed to the consumer in one direction. Modern and emerging mediums provide a more interactive, involved and engaging experience through a bi-directional channel. This is at least the case for the young, connected, and digital savvy generation who are becoming harder to penetrate through traditional advertising for a variety of reasons. These range from physical and technology factors including email and spam filters, connected communities such as facebook, mySpace, browser pop up blockers, on-demand TV filters such as TiVo and voicemail to text services such as SpinVox, it seems the only way to connect with your audience is to join them in their space on their terms. So even if the message gets through to this new digitally competent audience, it is more important that it is engaging, relevant and useful in a world connected through reviews, opinions and recommendations. After all, it is this medium that will build greater trust in a brand and in turn, improve a brand's reputation. It is no longer what you are being told by marketers that resonate but what peers are recommending or reviewing on your behalf.

Measuring success of the social marketplace.

Just look at successful marketplace sites such as eBay, Amazon, Dell or Zopa (social lending) or sites such as Digg.com, LinkedIn, Trip Advisor and Yelp where the main drivers behind their continued ascendancy are reviews, opinions and recommendations by a connected community who pride themselves on credibility and reputation by being engaged – What is the value of this engagement? How do we measure this? And ultimately what is the ROI of creating such a social marketplace. The question remains; how do you drive the value of engagement and how is this impacting your business and reputation online?

Lord Leverhulme, the soap powder magnate, once famously said: “I know 50% of my advertising budget is wasted – I just don’t know which half”. This was of course in the context of traditional TV advertising. In contrast, today we have the benefit of digital content and interactive media which allows us to measure customer engagement in real time through analytics, digital footprints and online monitoring – making it, in theory at least, possible to measure 100% of spend accurately although I challenge any online business to actually be dedicated to making this happen. However, there is a continued frustration with traditional web analytics, in that the measurements employed define success via traditional click-based and time-based metrics, instead of genuine engagement and influence based metrics.

Be Engaged with your customers where it matters

Engagement is a holistic characterisation of a consumer's behaviour, incorporating more detailed behavioural characteristics such as loyalty, satisfaction, involvement, word of mouth promotion and complaints but very few businesses or organisations are measuring this let alone actually integrating it into any of their digital marketing strategies when building a social marketplace.

The days when a customer’s only touch point with a brand was the URL of a website are well and truly over. Now it is increasingly important to have knowledge of how your customers have interacted with your brand. Who has subscribed to your news RSS feed and product offers, downloaded a podcast from your website, reviewed your book or product on Amazon and eBay, downloaded a news or product widget and blogged / commented about your product or brand while sharing this with friends and family through facebook, or MySpace. This new shift in consumer behaviour, enables people to engage with your brand, which allows them to collectively shape and influence your reputation. It is this that requires monitoring and understanding in the new social marketplace.

Tough times call for innovation and new ways of communicating

We must also start to consider that as we face one of the toughest economical times in our lifetime, any competitive advantage or social marketing strategy must include an engagement framework that allows businesses to filter through the noise and focus on the important digital influencers that are either positively or negatively impacting reputation or success in the connected world. In times like these its increasingly important to be engaged with your customers by working smarter to maintain an ongoing relationship – its cheaper to keep an existing customer than to attract new ones as many CEO’s and business development executives always tell us.

I would say it is no longer good enough to rely on traditional metrics, which provide inadequate insight or ROI, and rather focus on preparing and developing an engagement framework. In my experience from the travel sector a product with a neutral or positive review for example will outsell a similar product at least 4 to 1. How many times have you looked up Trip Advisor before booking your hotel or read a blog on a particular location or resort, before buying a book I can guarantee that most of you would have read a review or searched on Amazon for comments and blog posts. How many of you have asked a friend or colleague for their opinion or advice about make a decision? This all relates back to measuring the value of engagement through being involved in your networks via blogs, wikis, forums and communities. Helping people make advised decisions and then measuring the value of this response is what’s important.

Giving some serious thought to planning how to measure your reputation and success through a social marketplace based on measuring Involvement, Interaction, Intimacy and Influence is a fundamental step towards figuring out which 50% of the advertising budget has been unsuccessful and which 50% has engaged with your visitors will be a huge leap forward for digital marketers. If this all seems to make sense then why not turn your business into a social marketplace where being engaged through customer networks will bring success in the modern web.

The web is rich...with audio and video. Rich Media is the new king!

A report from Hitwise todays shows that online video traffic is up 41%; BBC iPlayer 22nd most popular UK website

BBC iPlayer 22nd most popular UK website. UK Internet traffic to Video websites has increased by 40.7% over the last 12 months. During February 2009, 1 in every 35 UK Internet visits went to a specialist Video website, up from 1 in every 50 in February 2008.

Source: Hitwise UK

With that in mind i thought i would share some of my thoughts on using Audio and Video as part of your online strategy and some best practice experience over the years.

What is the best method for using video and audio as part of your website?

It is important to think about the context and use of the media you are planning to create, share and deliver. For example a furniture company or clothing brand should look to create reasonably high quality professional video that provides the customer enough detail and confidence to purchase the product. Where as a travel company for example could be better positioned to create an online platform which enables their customers to create and upload their own user generated videos as this would provide a more authentic and trusted perspective of their products. From my experience you can increase conversions at least 4:1 with video content within the travel sector. Also don't stop their ensure you allow visitors to share, comment and rate your video content to see what content is having the most positive or negative impact which can then help you decide on what products to remove or improve. I would also add that its best to use the defacto standard Flash Video (.FLV) format to provide improved streaming and maximum audience reach.

Audio content works well for newspapers and magazines where visitors can listen to an article or interview while still navigating other content within the website. Audio works well for longer content articles and should be created to a high quality that can be played inline with a browser as a streaming format. As web natives become more distracted with visual content it makes sense to try and adopt audio where possible to capture your listeners for a longer period of time. A great example is the Guardian - http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/mar/17/sxswi-startups1 and the NMA podcast section http://podcast.nma.co.uk/ (which i actually listening to while writing this article)

What works best – video or podcasting?

As described in the response above their are various options but should be considered in context to your brand, how this will be delivered and who will be listening or watching your video / audio content. A very interesting use case my team are working on currently is to look at how banking organisations can use video for example to help better engage with customers when selling a financial product. As most people know the process and paperwork involved in completing a banking product can be very frustrating and complex but using a video or audio platform to explain the benefits and talk the customer through the application procedure would certainly see a major increase in conversions. My feeling is that we could increase by at least a 6:1 ratio purely as a unique proposition and more engaging way to explain a banking product which could then be rated, commented on and shared with friends and family.

I would also say that video works best for content in length of 1 - 10 minutes max but then audio becomes a better method to communicate in order to allow the listener to carry out other tasks while listening to the content. I also find that audio advertising can be better incorporated unobtrusively than video where the visual of an advert can upset the viewer.

According to Forrester’s Consumer Technographics® data, 64% of US online consumers watch online video on any subject at least monthly. Interactive marketers in travel and hospitality already embrace online video as an advertising medium — they plan to spend $200 million on pre-roll, in-player, in-stream, ad overlays and other video ad formats in 2008 and will spend $1.6 billion by 2012 Source: Forrester

Measurement: how do you measure effectiveness of a campaign (purely on views/downloads or conversions?

Lord Leverhulme, the soap powder magnate, once famously said: “I know 50% of my advertising budget is wasted – I just don’t know which half”. This was of course in the context of traditional TV advertising. In contrast, today we have the benefit of digital content and interactive media which allows us to measure customer engagement in real time through analytics, digital footprints and online monitoring – making it, in theory at least, possible to measure 100% of spend accurately. Using tools such as www.feedburner.com, www.google.com/analytics, www.clickdensity.com or commercial tools such as webtrends or omniture its is possible to monitor views, visits, interactions, sharing, customer comments and then see how these create a networked effect with traction to your website or booking engine. Feedburner for example provides some excellent tools which show how many subscribers' of your podcast have listened to your content and how long each person listened for in length so you could easily identify if they reached that crucial advert in the 3rd quarter of your interview for example. Video can provide physical heat maps and trends of click paths within the video element which can be tracked to a specific website or page URL. The question for the business would be the importance of engagement (views) over interaction (clicks) virility (sharability) or comments (sentiment). It would then be possible to look at scoring these actions based on importance to that use case.

I truly believe we are going to see many challenges going forward managing rich media assets as part of an overall web strategy, i don't believe posting all of your video content to youTube directly is the best approach for your long term content management solution. I think companies who are smart enough to manage their own rich media through proper integrated solutions will gain the greater benefit for the long term.

Into the Twittersphere....

I received a link to this excellent video today from @esegar (much appreciated) and made me laugh. This takes a very satirical view of Twitter but will make you laugh. The fail whale scene is brilliant!

Status updates with micro blogging replaces email

Its becoming apparent that email is being superseded by new forms of rapid response communication channels like Twitter, Yammer, FriendFeed and Facebook status updates. Facebook even recently changed its status update question from "What are you doing right now? to "what's on your mind?" with the aim of encouraging people to communicate their thoughts publicly as a form of real time communication. I must admit its even taken me by surprise just how quickly and effectively these new forms of communication are working. I have noticed a massive decrease in the volumes of email i am receiving as the core form of communication but finding more use through our company Yammer application (a form of Twitter for the enterprise), FriendFeed and facebook status updates.

These forms of communication do not replace email per sa but provide a new more effective communication tool that email was never very effective at handling in the first place. Micro blogging channels such as Twitter and Yammer are more of a rapid response broadcast channel where you can put out some ideas, thoughts, suggestion and useful bite sized nuggets of content that people can consume, respond, reply or pass on (retweet) easily with minimum effort. This creates transparency through a network effect providing a more effective way to share and communicate content.

Below is a recent article from the BBC Technology website describing the shift with new forms of communication.

"I think it's a new form of communication; not quite e-mail, more lightweight and more real time, often with little bit of a publishing flavour to it," said Paul Buchheit, founder of FriendFeed, and the creator and lead developer of GMail, while at Google.

FriendFeed lets users share content from other services, such as Twitter and Flickr, and comment directly on the postings in real-time.

Simplicity and ubiquity

With more than 175 million users Facebook is the dominant platform for status updates.

Ari Steinberg, an engineering manager at the firm, told BBC News: "It's been interesting to see the way people change the way they communicate.

"You used to e-mail content to people and you had to choose who you wanted to e-mail it to and you didn't know if your friends even wanted to see it.

"Now you can passively put something out there and let people engage with it."

The simplicity and ubiquity of some of these services is beginning to see activity feeds and status updates replace many of the uses to which e-mail was once put.

Full Article at the BBC : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7942304.stm

Dynamic filtering of content with trusted networks is the future of find not search!

I believe there will be a need for dynamic filtering of micro content and information syndication which only bubbles up the key points of content in a contextual way. I believe that there is so much noise and distraction with content today that it can be counter-productive if not managed and filtered correctly. Also people will become a lot smarter about the people they follow and the information the decide to engage with. So in other words as we move away from pure email comms and we have these other core channels such as IM, Broadcast micro blogs like Yammer and Twitter, social network information, location based data from the like of latitude we will see a maturity of the content filtering technology. Example. I update my status within my enterprise social network to "Craig is working on an RFP with HBOS for websites in London" I would then expect an aggregated filter of content that would be related to RFP's, HBOS from possibly UK . Facebook are already working on this at much more detailed level where my interests, status updates will determine what content is shown from my network. Finally i guarantee Google will acquire Twitter this year for any price as its the biggest threat to their search solution!

Social Capital and the future of Enterpise Collaboration: CeBIT Video Interview with Martin Kosser

Björn has done a good job editing and dubbing the footage, so now here’s part 1 of the video interviews, done in preparation of the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 summit.

With Martin Kosser of Frogpond.de we talked about social capital, how email is for old people, locating and leveraging knowledge in organizations, how OpenText is understanding the Enterprise 2.0 market and how they’re tailoring their offerings, enjoy:

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