Web 2.0 and the Enterprise

In this blog I have made several points that are reinforced by this McKinsey interview of Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His new book, Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for your Organization’s Toughest Challenges, explores the ways that leading organizations are bringing Web 2.0 tools inside.
I highly recommend you give a listen.

The points I found reinforced:

Top down versus bottom up
I've been in the top down crowd, working with executives to encourage them to use Web 2.0 tools and technologies, with varying degrees of success. Lately I have been recommending Twitter as an educational channel and using it effectively as such, but I do get a lot of push back. As Mr. McAfee notes "...what you see is—particularly for longer- tenured workers, particularly for older workers—this is a big shift for them, changing their current work practices and moving over to Enterprise 2.0" and, therefore, the longer tenured workers of the world don't particular warm to the subject.

Faking it
One of the things that makes Mr. McAfee pessimistic makes me so as well.
"When the blogs read like press releases and when they don’t, for example, turn
on the commenting feature on their blog, so that it’s just another megaphone for an
executive to shout at the organization. " He adds: "There are plenty of those out there already, and people don’t react too well to that."

Organic vs. processed information
If you are in middle management, particular marketing communications, and "view your job as one of gate keeping or refereeing information flows, you should be pretty frightened by these
technologies, because they’re going to greatly reduce your ability to do that."

Listen to what he has to say.

Four Case Studies: How These (Very Different) B2B Organizations Are Succeeding With Social Media : MarketingProfs

Four Case Studies: How These (Very Different) B2B Organizations Are Succeeding With Social Media : MarketingProfs

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Succeeding With Social Media : Four Examples

Four Case Studies: How These (Very Different) B2B Organizations Are Succeeding With Social Media : MarketingProfs
Here are four examples of how SAP, Business Week, Equation Research and Radian are using social media to generate leads and business.

If you are a small business and a B2B company, selling to other businesses, your marketing strategy is relationship, not transaction based. Social media, indeed most of the Web 2.0 tools, work best with relationship marketing. None of the examples in this article are small businesses, but they do provide a stepping off point for business people to consider. The marketing professionals at these companies stress two basic principles of using social media I find worth repeating again and again. They are:

(1) It doesn't stand well alone.
Joe Westhuizen, VP of education strategy at SAP, stresses the value of experimentation: "Don't be afraid to apply B2C disciplines within a B2B framework. Try a range of tactics but use your analytic tools to watch them closely. When one takes off, get behind it with your other marketing channels. For example, if a direct marketing promotion is strong, amplify it with social media. And if a social media promotion works, amplify it with promotional codes, direct mail, or online videos."

(2) It isn't one way communication about us-us-us
Reflecting on Equation's foray into social media, Chris Burke, director of business development, recommends the following: "Use Social Media as a way to create new streams of value for audiences, not as another means to broadcast a marketing message. Especially when targeting B2B professionals, the first step in engagement should be asking the question, 'How can we add real value to the conversation?'"

Citibank Survey Reveals Small Businesses Not Joining Social Media Conversation

Citibank Survey Reveals Small Businesses Not Joining Social Media Conversation

The is a great opportunity for savvy small business owners who understand the value of relationships as the slower your competition embraces Web 2.0 technologies, the better for you.

The Internet has blurred the distinction between personal and professional making it necessary to address your "Whole Brand" when establishing an online presence. The Whole Brand consists of individual (personal and professional), your company, a product/service, and the category of thought leadership e.g. sustainable design for an architect. I created The Whole Brand program for sole proprietors and small, two or three person firms, so that taking advantage of technology is done in an meaningful and orderly way. Guess I have a lot of prospective clients out there, assuming that another 15% of the market is getting ready to join in.

McKinsey Research on Web 2.0

The recent McKinsey report on the business benefits of Web 2.0 suggests that collaboration tools, especially networks a.k.a social networks, are better positioned within the category of Web 2.0 technologies and tools rather than as a stand-alone "application," especially a customer focused one!

In their study, social networking is the highest ranked technology being used to acquire new customers, followed by blogs, video sharing, and podcasts.

In terms of customer service, another mission critical application area for most companies these days, wikis move into fourth position with blogs moving into the first position.

These and other charts are available as part of a new interactive tool on the McKinsey site.

On the other hand, last month William Band at Forrester Research wrote about a study whereby executives ranked "application importance to business operations" and customer communities platforms came in dead last.
The Band article in Customer Think noted "Although enterprise feedback solutions, customer community platforms, and customer forums are viewed positively by the respondents in our survey, none of these three are considered "critical" to success. Therefore at this time, business value discounted for uncertainty is low." By the way, Customer Think folks advocate the term social CRM which is yet another example of Web 2.0 technologies being pigeon-holed into existing monster applications.

It is clear that confusion reigns in what to call these people networks, what use they are being put by B2B and B2C clients, and what applications category they fall into making it difficult to know what research to use in assessing their value and risk.

Three observations:

When I hear early adopters talk about their experience with people networks, they talk about how community is being tapped to drive change in product design and development and in the practices (and headcount) of other departments, especially customer and technical support.

Yet confusion exists among vendors, consultants, and clients as to Web 2.0 terminology and the uses for the technologies/tools resulting in divergent viewpoints.

However, the success and value of integrating Web 2.0 tools to address mission critical business objectives in the more traditional application areas of contact center infrastructure, customer service/support, business intelligence, and product development/management is why early adopters are gaining a competitive advantage and not talking too much about it. Just ask their customers.

Effective Use of Video on Websites

When you click on Earthsayes.tv, the voices of sustainability, a video begins to play automatically. We will add shortly an option to mute the video for those who are not in a place where audio is a good option. We did this because the subject is not generally known to most viewers and this is a way to get them involved without having to do anything or make any choices. Plus, the DoubleClick Research report of September 2008 on video complete rate was supportive of this design decision even though we are not advertisers, but educators:

"The video complete rate is a measure of how many of video impressions served and commenced to play were watched through to the end of the video advertising message. Advertisers can make a few simple creative choices to enhance video complete rates. Figure 16 shows that 40% of video plays are completed in the expanding video format. An even larger 55% of video plays are completed in the in-page video format. These numbers speak to the effectiveness of video at delivering an advertiser’s message to audiences. The choice between auto-play and user-initiated video will affect video complete rates. Our aggregate data skews toward auto-play video. We believe that advertisers using user-initiated video should expect lower video complete rates than those in Figure 16."

Download the complete report, "DoubleClick Creative Insights" from my whitepaper library. See column on left.

Does Your IT Department Block Access?

I conducted a poll on LinkedIn asking the question, Does your IT department block access to social sites e.g. facebook and twitter. Nineteen responses with 63% reporting "NO!" Another 31% reported yes, lower than the 46% reported by senior executives.