Here're the killer apps for convergence: presence, conferencing, contact centers and more.
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Written by Peter Brockmann
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 Mobile social networking is a growing opportunity to harness the passions of supporters
What do politics, contests and certain kinds of branding or public service campaigns all have in common?
They are ideally suited to mobile social networking. Citizens want to stay connected with campaign HQ and all are subject to perishable information. The candidate issues a new position paper and needs supporters to comment on it on their blogs. The contest just issued the first $100,000 prize and so the opportunity window is closing. The branding campaign just released their latest YouTube clip and want to share it with you. The latest public service message has been drafted and the .org would like your feedback through a vote and survey process.
For the most part, web 2.0 and mobilizing web 2.0 has not really been all that exciting for enterprise. However, there are big opportunities for mobile social networking to link people to an idea foundry that feeds their passion and connects them to perishable information. Brockmann & Company has written extensively on enterprise adoption of social media networking, blogging, wikis and forums and they've been pretty much limited to select industries and organizational sizes where the friction of geography, time zones and scale dilute the effect of corporate culture and constrain operations. Wikis accelerate learning about the way things get done in the firm. Blogs humanize the company, and services like twitter and linkedin have specialized roles in PR and HR.
One company delivering social networking services for client campaigns and organizations is Purple Forge of Ottawa. I met one of the founders and VP of Sales and Marketing, John Craig in Ottawa earlier this week. John showed me the product on his iPhone. The model is simple and functionality is high. Users download the Fans of the campaign download the app from the App store (BlackBerry and Android versions are coming) and stay connected with the campaign's announcements, news and the like which are pushed to the mobile device. Users can participate in ad hoc polls, write about the latest events on their Facebook page and create their own Twitter updates based of course, on the campaign's initial tweet.
The company is eyeing the US election cycle of 38 gubernatorial races in 2010 and the dozens of senators in the running and has ambitions in the upcoming UK and Canadian elections. No doubt this will be a big part of the new party machinery that Republicans will adopt as a lesson from the Obama campaign machine of 2008. But there are other applications that come to mind:
- Public service campaigns - Right To Life, AARP, American Medical Association, American Chamber of Commerce, ACORN can use these services to stay in touch with their supporters and mobilize them as appropriate with surveys, blog post invitations, tweets and more.
- Student radio stations - getting students on campus to stay in touch with the campus radio station is a huge challenge for campus programs (David Brockmann can provide plenty of experience about these dynamics in a modern campus), but integrating social networking with a cool mobile phone app framework is a great way to make the station cool and build listeners.
- Contests - I participated in the McDonald's Monopoly game the other day, which could have been mobilized with daily reminders, contest news and personal tallies comparing my points and my friends points. No doubt, their next rev of this or other games could incorporate this kind of creative, emotional-linking networking multiplication that would accelerate results of the contest and strengthen the attachment of mobile gamers which would expand the appeal of the contest beyond the frequent McDonald's visitors today.
- Selected branding campaigns - here the focus has be on stimulating the lifetime relationship with an important-in-my-life brand. Maybe certain lifestyle brands - Toyota Prius Hybird, Apple, Dell or Microsoft to name 3 ought to be engaging their customers and brand followers more personally and more directly through mobile social networking.
Mood of the Nation is an iPhone app that pools your answers to your mood with hundreds or thousands of other users who have likewise done the same. MOTN was built as a demo of the networking and updating technologies at the heart of Purple Forge's business.
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Written by Peter Brockmann
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You did know that Twitter was out of service yesterday?
Among the roar from Twitterers was this hilarious post from esarcasm.com. What did you do during the great Twitter outage of 2009? |
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Written by Peter Brockmann
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My previous post on this topic generated an inquiry which I answered by email as follows:
Does Brockmann think small compagnies don't really need to implement social networks ? Is it important to mix the simpler technologies to the new ones?
It depends on the goal of the social network technology and who the participants are. Forums for example, are great for any organization since they are aimed at helping customers solve problems with the company's products. Customers can get tips on how to solve their problem by searching and reading. It's a very effective 'support staff multiplier' and self-service machine that customers are used to and like. Wikis on the other hand, are less useful for small organizations because the administration overheads are more onerous than the productivity benefits. Small organizations tend to be single location offices so there are usually few geographical barriers. Permanent expressions of corporate policies (posters, binders) for example, are easily accessible by all employees.
On the other hand, large global organizations have many people with the same job function in different timezones where physical expressions are a lot harder to keep up-to-date and uniformly available. For large global organizations wikis are very useful. Here they play a big role in employee education on policies, prevent duplicate learning, allow users with common interests to find each other and collaborate in a time-shifting way: you contribute content at your convenience, and I edit/contribute to it at mine.
Is the new technologies the solution for the big enterprises to improve their collaboration ?
Yes. Big enterprises have the biggest barriers with geography, time zones and culture. Normally, coordination across these barriers to achieve some corporate-wide goal such as a new product project is expensive and bureaucratic. Official information flows have tended to be hierarchical which introduces delays and often 'colors' the content as it flows up and then then down. Social technologies such as blogs, wikis, forums and maps are really useful in allowing people in different geographies, time zones and cultures to share ideas, project artifacts (memos, presentations, software code, hardware designs) and otherwise provide a 'Corporate Memory' function that employees can access at their convenience, without having the bureaucratic problems of the past.
Faster information flow means faster collaboration with higher quality project outcomes and therefore substantial impacts on the competitive success of the firm. The Web 2.0: A New Class of Corporate Memory report highlights these impacts on customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, revenue per employee and other metrics.
Are the pen and whiteboard gonna be used for a long period in enterprise despite the new technologies ?
Oh yes. The pen and whiteboard are great physical tools appropriate for in-person meetings. Writing on the whiteboard makes ideas take a physical form. Writing on paper makes it a permanent expression and quite easy for users to reference at a later time. I have learned from our research on the use of conferencing communications that Face-to-Face meetings are the most frequent meeting class:
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Written by Peter Brockmann
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 Of all the meetings at Enterprise 2.0, the most impressive success story was the Newsgator presentation. The Denver CO company, founded in 2004 as an RSS system has really redefined their offer to address Microsoft Office SharePoint customer needs for more sophisticated collaboration services. Today, the company boasts 175 customers and over 1 million seats.
Supporting probably a dozen specific modules for addressing enterprise collaboration needs, the Newsgator portfolio extends SharePoint standard capabilities (SharePoint is typically sold with Microsoft Exchange and represents a market of some 100 million seats) with webparts (widgets and plugin software) that enable the social computing class of enterprise applications, as part of a broader Microsoft Office enterprise strategy.
In a future post I'll review the basics of the portfolio and its applicability in terms of the trends we see in our Web 2.0 research reports. One of the more interesting discussions with Laura Faralley, VP Marketing was around applicability of these technologies for different markets, industries and segments. |
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Written by Peter Brockmann
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 Also, while at Enterprise 2.0 I had a chance to meet up with the CEO of Bluenog, Suresh Kuppusamy. The Piscataway NJ company, formed by several formerly BEA executives in 2006, is a systems integration / open source collaboration software company that concentrates on the glue that binds typical enterprise content management system implementations with business intelligence and enterprise wiki and calendaring services more commonly associated with portals.
Customers, including Columbia University, NYU and Wellesley College are using the Integrated Collaboration Environment ICE 4.5 to enable students to have a personal portal where their calendars are managed so professors can update deadlines and deliverables, students can access important college business processes such as news, policies, wikis, and administrators can manage important business processes.
The Bluenog ICE includes:
- pre-integrated software
- integrations to leading commercial products including Oracle Fusion, Sungard Banner and Documentum
- Eclipse-based IDE
- sample code
Suresh pointed out that it is the integration between the silos of information typical of most businesses that define their company's basic implementation contracts. Because of that, the business intelligence gap - the pain of seeing so much information potential on different sytems - is the starting point for a discussion with customers. It's not about rip and replace, but about integrate and present. The predictable flat fee for server support and licensing is very attractive as well. Customers pay an annual license and support fee of $25,000 which funds the latest releases and software support. No per user, no per CPU.
The company also offers systems integration services for tune open source, commercial or custom software to address the business goals. |
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Written by Peter Brockmann
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 While at Enterprise 2.0 here in Boston, I met up with Russell Mix, CEO of Qtask, the Burbank CA, Syndey Australia and St Petersburg Russia software company who briefed me on the product and its market. After only nine months in the market, Qtask has achieved some 3,000 subscribers from organizations of all sizes.
What brings these customers to the SaaS project management company is the need to assure transparency and accountability. Some organizations pride themselves on their business process. Some organizations NEED to pride themselves on their business process, especially in this down economy. So, for the most professional and productive teams, work units or companies, a renewed focus on the business process can become the defining mechanism of how they control work and focus resources on the things that need to get done to create value for customers.
For these customers, teams and workgroups the challenge of adopting any serious process-oriented technology has been security, ubiquity and discipline. Qtask addresses all of these issues:
- Only authenticated users have access to their authenticated and assigned work tasks and content.
- The use of a SaaS implementation means that users can login from any Internet-attached computer which unless you work in a particularly isolated organization means anywhere.
- The discipline issue is addressed in two ways: by making the implementation very, very convenient including offering a mobile-optimized dashboard that is addressable from any web browser-supporting mobile device (See this page for more feature comparisons); and by providing easy reporting services that indicate who's late, really late and who isn't using the product.
So, for complex projects where users could be part of different companies or where users are separated by time and geography, or where the scope of tasks make for a very complex operation, Qtask is well positioned to be an inexpensive ($30/user/month) and highly functional solution to make sure resources are focused and productive. |
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Written by Peter Brockmann
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 In the Wall Street Journal this morning (subscription required), the explosive growth of Twitter (noun) and the rise of twittering (verb) has stressed the founders and operations staff of the VC-backed California company. With recent rounds of financing valuing the company at $255 million, there doesn't seem to be any downside for the 45-person operation.
I've been twittering too, but rather rarely - like when I remember to do so. Even still, I've managed to gather 47 followers in about as many days.
The problem that the Journal highlights is that the company has no monetary model, no method for monetization, no staff with the goal to develop the monetization model and no discussions about how and when to figure that question out... and according to the Journal, the founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams don't seem worried about that either.
It's a rarified throwback to the early days of Google and Yahoo! and Netscape before that when all you had to do was focus on executing and scaling the technology - the money will flow later - or so the VCs were told. And many bought into that approach, but sooner or later there was a piper to pay. In the case of Netscape it killed the company and in the case of Google and Yahoo! it worked quite smoothly, because the revenue model was a tangential component of exposing search users to ads along the same lines as their search requests.
How micro-blogging can be monetized is another question. Our recent report on business usage of Twitter, gives a few insights into how business people are using the service, but the revenue-generating applications are a little sparce right now.
Maybe, there are intranet applications of Twitter for help desk support among colleagues or for senior executives. The company however would need to restrict access to the tweets to only employees...
- Imagine a Twitter dialog - 'how do I reset my voicemail password?' 'http://www.resetyourpasswordhere.com' 'thanks'. Sort of a chat-blog hybrid.
- Imagine a Twitter notice from your boss - 'just finished the latest ppt. Pls review.' 'ok.' Sort of a real-time email reinforcer.
Sadly, in both these examples, I can do the same with IM.
There are no links between what I'm tweeting about and advertising (and even then they'd be really, really hard for an algorithm to figure out in 140 characters). A subscription service will kill participation - $5/month for 10 followers/followees, $500/month for unlimited followers/followees? Yuk.
What if Twitter is a fad like PointCast? Then the valuation and business model won't matter because it'll eventually be replaced as features of other services. I bet a subscription service will kill participation - $5/month for 10 followers/followees, $500/month for unlimited followers/followees? |
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