10 steps to 2.0 interactivity nirvana

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 (link to past posts on this subject, click here) and co-marketing, but the real issue is not about whether this is required but in actual 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.

A friend of mine who is also in charge of a large enterprise portal - his is for a large National retail bank but the issues are really similar to a large extent - was telling me about blogging in his bank. At first, there was some sort of fear, or even disbelief that blogs could lead to anything concrete for the Bank. But one day the General Manager listened to a program on the national radio and he grasped that there was something happening and when he came back to the office, he asked his people about their current plans for using blogs at the Bank to initiate discussions with its clients (and mainly its young clients). His question was echoed all around the top floors until it came all the way back down to the shop-floor and my friend was in a position to do something about it. Actually, not everyone liked what they saw, because client conversations can sometimes be very direct and to be worthwhile, even - or even mostly - not so good comments have to be retained (he had to teach them that and quite a few gnashed their teeth about it). Indeed, they are often the ones which can lead to the most interesting product/service improvements.

But not all corporations are ready to face that music which such good humour and besides, I am not really in favour of big bang approaches to change. There is so much resistance to it in all countries and all sectors that I believe it’s much easier and more effective to apply a staged-approach to change and interactivity. This is why I designed the following interactivity matrix. It was very useful to me and instrumental in selling - smoothly - the idea of expert Corporate blogging. As a matter of fact, this is a first step towards interactivity. It can serve as a test for more interactivity and more adventurous ventures. It can also be beneficial in terms of visibility and traffic gain.

As far as B2B is concerned, there are even areas where interactivity can be instilled for a much lower price and risk-free. This is what I have entitled shared extranet collaboration spaces on which client user groups or even extended sales teams (ie teams including clients’ and partners’ representatives) can exchange files, share information on wiki pages, and even initiate discussion threads in forums. To that end I implemented an online version of Microsoft Sharepoint which enables such teams to collaborate on the web, freely but securely (we even have a SSL connection implemented to enforce data encryption). Extended teams are quite enthusiastic about this, there is no risk at all and management is also very supportive of the idea. I think this is a great step towards interactivity. Ideagoras and full interactivity with clients is of the course the ultimate goal, but they also require maturity and learning curves. The reason why this matrix was so useful is that it helped me fill the gaps which needed to be filled urgently and it helped me buy more time to better implement more ambitious initiatives in the future.

• further reading: ‘15 rules for Web 2.0′

 

e-mail usage: 12 worst practices and recommended strategies for better communications

12 worst practices of e-mail usage in the workplace and recommended strategies for increased productivity (in 6 installments) by Yann Gourvennec

As announced in a previous post, here is 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.

>> you can read the entirety of this article online at Visionarymarketing.com

 

Improving management’s vision of the realities of business : Processes or Networks?

In response to our initial post, C.R. asked for more details on how IT distorts management’s vision of reality. Given the work and resources that have gone into enterprise applications over the last two decades, he asks, why doesn’t IT feed back a true image of how we work? If the daily statistics and scorecards provided by today’s business applications don’t seem to “ring true”, what can an organization do to improve the quality of the data to better reflect individual customers, projects, and opportunities? To understand this challenge, and to explore potential scenarios to improve enterprise applications, we need to first consider how business applications today represent and aggregate data, then explore the fundamental weaknesses in this logic, and finally investigate other avenues of putting the pieces together.

Enterprise applications, including those dedicated to enterprise resource planning, supply chain management and even project management, and are largely based on the principles of business process improvement. A process can best be understood as a set of activities and tasks that managers group together to meet internal or external client demands. Processes thus have four defining characteristics: their origin can be detected in an organization’s recognition of a client need for a product, service or information, they consume resources, and they have a set cost and produce a benefice that ideally meets the clients’ needs.

Improving business processes requires tracking inefficiencies in how an organization captures market demand, supply or measurement. How are an organizational activities and tasks executed to capture client demands? How can an organization improve its capacity to deliver products and services? How does the organization capture and evaluate costs and benefits? Enterprise applications provide responses to these fundamental questions in allowing management to map the current state of existing processes, implement best practices around ideal designs of how these processes should work, and measure organizational progress to these goals.

The resulting ‘process-centric” view of the organization is often a weak approximation of the reality of business practice, and as such limits the usefulness of enterprise applications. One reason for this is that business process improvement was originally designed for organizations producing standardized physical goods, modeling processes around personalized services and/or information delivery has proven a much more difficult assignment. Implementing business processes assumes that management (or their business partners) understand where an industry or a market is headed, an assumption that is sorely tested today in industries ranging from information services to banking to telecommunications.

Moreover, the notion of “best practices” which assumes that there is “one best way” to build product or deliver services has been widely disputed in organizations that have traditionally put a premium on company culture, customization, and understanding individual customer needs. Finally, improving business processes assumes that the employees and managers involved in the targeted processes agree with organizational objectives, and are willing and able to follow organizational guidelines. In many situations, even this assumption is contested by those that prefer focusing on the realities of their organization and their market (i.e. getting the job done) than complying to unrealistic or unworkable company procedures. For all of these reasons, “process-centric” software most often offers management a highly distorted view of the realities of the workplace.

If we abandon the notion of processes, how can business applications be modeled to provide a more realistic view of work? A growing number of management specialists are underlining the importance of networks in understanding how employees and managers actually get work done. In business, networks are interconnected systems of people that share common interests, beliefs, and goals. Social and business networks are used by workers and managers alike to solve problems, to identify opportunities, to build trust and passion, and make sense of their jobs, organizations and careers. These networks cross organizational boundaries; they are composed of centers of influence (the “hubs”) and are held together by the intensity of personal relationships (the “links”).

If most managers understand the importance of their personal networks, improving networks requires understanding how these networks function and how they can be extended and strengthened. Social researchers have identified a number of defining characteristics of networks that potentially can help mangers improve their effectiveness: “power laws“, “degrees of separation“, “discontinuous change“, “fat tails“, etc. These networks are held together by common beliefs, passions, trust or know-how: in other words non-structured information that largely escapes “process-centric” view of enterprise. The power of networks has fueled the popularity of a new breed of the social media applications: LinkedIn, Plaxo, and Facebook are among the better known examples. Will this new generation of software applications help management improve their business?

One value proposition of such network-centric applications is to shift the focus of attention away from an ideal set of activities and tasks (what we “should” be doing) to how employees and managers actually get things done (what they “are” doing). A second insight of a network based view of business is the understanding that networks are self-structuring; people seek to work with those their share their goals, passions and beliefs. A third point of interest is understanding the importance of “non-structured” data, just because we can’t get passions, trust and know-how into a spreadsheet doesn’t mean they don’t largely influence the way we work. Finally, this line of inquiry reminds us that business is essentially a human activity; technology’s role in business is limited to understanding, uncovering and eventually enhancing the human interaction that defines the nature of “work”. For management and their business partners, these propositions constitute powerful levers to improve the value of information technology.

None-the-less, there certainly is a considerable amount of work to be done before applications like LinkedIn or Facebook help managers improve their jobs, organizations and careers. The metaphors of “avatars”, “friends” and “connections” don’t easily translate into the realities of either commerce or industry. The personal information, photos, and videos available in social media today are certainly interesting, but often of little use in driving a business forward. These applications today are largely hard coded; it is difficult or often impossible for end-users to enrich either the information or the software. These applications capture data on how end-users wish to see themselves, rather than how they actually practice business (or anything else…). Most importantly, these virtual networks don’t elucidate today the passions, beliefs, and goals that define how individual professional networks operate. If network-centric applications provide a glance of how the future of enterprise applications can improve business practice, these images need to be brought into focus.

 

9 reasons why you should improve your CRM with intelligent virtual agents (IVA’s)

Virtualisation of customer services interaction was quoted by Time (March 200 as being one of the ‘10 ideas which are changing the world‘. Pascal Levy-Garboua, Director, Business Development of Virtuoz.com, a leading-edge provider of IVA (intelligent virtual agents) technology, is giving us more insight into the future of customer relationship management in this post written on behalf of Visionary Marketing.

Intelligent virtual agents improve Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Intelligent virtual agents are changing the face of online customer service and are fast becoming the main channel of customer support communication for generation Y. However, the domain of artificial intelligence and its presence on the Internet today is still relatively unfamiliar to many. “Intelligent virtual agent” has yet to become a widespread buzz word in the field of CRM, but it is full of potential.

So what exactly are virtual agents about, and what can they be used for?

IVAs are artificial intelligence programs which translate to autonomous, graphically embodied agents which appear in an online environment. Graphic design for each individual virtual agent may vary from video animation to a photo or an avatar, in an interactive 2D or 3D environment, in order to fit with a company’s brand image.

Intelligent virtual agents can be designed and built with the capacity to fulfill a multitude of functions on the Internet. They offer a large variety of online functional abilities which allows their missions to be accurately defined according to their role in the customer cycle. Be it for marketing purposes, help and advice with website navigation, sales functions, customer support or sales follow up, intelligent virtual agents are increasingly being sourced by companies to bring more personalized interaction to their CRM.

IVAs in the CRM cycle

IVA strategies for improving online CRM

1. Immediate and ubiquitous real time access to answers. IVAs offer customers immediate and ubiquitous real time access to answers using a variety of functionalities. Customers are thus saved from frustrating time on hold with a customer service center or, as is the case with traditional search engines and FAQ explorers, from trawling through mountains of web content in order to find their answer.
2. A personalized, tailored service. IVAs can mirror the in store experience from a customer standpoint. The ability to connect to company back office databases allows agents to retrieve personal information to provide the most tailored answer.
3. Encouraging online self help and increasing web content ease of access. Online virtual agents encourage online self service and increase web content accessibility to even the Internet beginner. Helping e-customers efficiently zero in on the information they are looking for is consequential to CRM, helping to alleviate customer frustration when they cannot find a certain page, or certain information. Through facilitating online services discovery, virtual agents are becoming an invaluable tool in cross and up-selling as well as in the maintenance and reinforcing of a company’s brand strength and recognition.
4. Proactive approach to customer issues. By simulating a text chat session with a live agent, encouraging customers to visit certain pages, and offering co-browsing, the Virtual Interactive agent is an efficient and low cost method of internet guidance, helping people perform tasks such as locating information, placing orders, or making reservations. Virtual agents are proactive in their approach to customers’ issues, identifying the customer problem and providing a personal, pertinent answer. Occupying sales and marketing roles, agents can be an effective viral marketing tool, acting to increase a customer contact base using proactive questions and features which push the customer to action. Market studies have shown an actual increase in customer satisfaction after IVA implementation, owing to the virtual agents’ ease of use and the pleasant customer experience they provide.
5. Personalized human-like interaction. The humanized nature of virtual agents makes them easier for customers to approach. IVAs have a personality defined to compliment their professional mission, which allows them to convey a more bespoke service and add a human touch to online customer care. It has been observed that this humanized approach is reciprocated from the human end, where a reported 70% of visitors greet and say farewell to virtual agents. Indeed in a world where e-commerce is becoming a driving force, increasing competition will require e-businesses to humanize online interactions, mirroring the in-store experience with more tailored, engaging conversations.
6. Supplementing outsourcing with virtual sourcing. IVAs allow companies with large customer service flows to supplement service center outsourcing with Virtual Sourcing. An agents’ ability to handle unlimited requests at any one time helps to take a dramatic load off traditional call centers, reducing the need to invest more time and money as businesses’ CRM needs grow.
7. The most advanced technologies offer a predictive dimension that allows real time adaptation to customer behaviour. Contrary to previous generation “keyword-based” chatter bots, recently developed IVAs, such as those produced by VirtuOz, can evaluate a customer’s previous behaviour and trends to predict the course of an interaction. This allows the agent to adapt its strategy in real time to meet the clients’ needs and fulfilling a variety of missions simultaneously.
8. Existing call center productivity optimized. IVAs all have well calculated exit strategies to ensure the customer is never left with their issue unsolved and has not wasted their time. Agents can be interfaced with other CRM tools such as webforms, callback systems and live chat, to render the customer service process more efficient. Agents automatically categorize customer issues, enabling them not only to transfer to the most relevant customer channel, but also to only transmit information pertinent to the customer’s problem. This allows for quicker resolution, therefore increasing existing customer service centres productivity levels. Comprehensive reporting tools, where all conversations are registered for monitoring, allow stringent quality control and ensure that agents are performing to the required standard, a quality which of course is near impossible with human customer care.
9. Integration with other web based services. IVAs, such as the recent French development Skaaz, (www.skaaz.com) can be integrated with Instant Messaging services, blogs and social networking sites; such artificial intelligence technology may also soon appear in virtual worlds, such as Second Life, where AI software will be able to profit from interactions with humans and increase its knowledge base according to its experiences.

 

Several major players in the business world have already jumped onto the band-waggon of excitement surrounding IVAs and their ability to revolutionize online CRM. The French arm of eBay, www.ebay.fr, integrated Louise, an IVA made by European leaders VirtuOz, onto their site in 2007 in a bid to reduce the high volume of emails and calls received by their call centers. After only 2 months the volume of emails received by eBay.fr’s customer service department diminished significantly, while email qualification was increased, allowing the existing CS systems to experience a sharp increase in productivity. Communications giant Neuf-AOL, also in France, economizes 1 phone call per customer per year with their IVA, named Chloé.

IVAs and the future

Contrary to public belief, the roots of the technology were planted several years ago. Simple keyword based agents such as Colloquis’ Encarta on MSN Messenger and Ikea’s agent by Artificial Solutions provided a broad technological base from which more flexible and powerful agents have stemmed. Having already developed the predictive dimension now associated with agents, European leaders in artificial intelligence, VirtuOz, are currently in the process of developing voice recognition for their IVAs, which will add yet another dimension to online customer support. The popularity of agents is ever growing amongst brand companies who are looking to revolutionize their online approach to CRM and profit from rapid ROI. Customers can already access agents across a wide range of channels, and when IVAs become even more accessible over mobile media channels (PDAs, cell phones), agents will surely be commonplace not only for business CRM strategies across the web, but for personal use also. IVAs will give users even greater and easier access to information than currently is the case.

 

Building software to accurately reflect the work “place”

Although IT vendors can proudly claim that computer technology is nearly ubiquitous in business today, many managers remain quite skeptical 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” my ambition in this blog for the coming months will be to explore IT frameworks that amplify these voices to strengthen future success stories of business.

Deploying information technologies to focus on the complexity of business practice will require that vendors and organizations alike give some serious thought to how they design and deploy information technology. Instead of limiting our conversation to choices of information architectures, programming languages and features and functions, we would to extend the scope of discussion to explore how software can enhance or distort our views of our jobs, our organizations, and our clients. In today’s world of mobile workers, dotted-line management, multiple communication channels and “virtual” clients, information technology inevitably plays an increasingly critical role in putting the pieces of business together into a more or less meaningful whole.

The mirror image that most business applications feed back to managers today is biased around structured data, processes, and efficiency metrics. As a result, these applications tend to minimize the importance of non-structured data, networks, effectiveness, innovation and passion. Faced with this distorted view of reality, line management is faced with two options. They can “play the game” by enthusiastically filling in the tables, reports and scorecards that fit their own manager’s view of the market. They can alternatively develop personal information strategies that will help them identify, structure and qualify the knowledge that is important to their assignments, companies, and careers. Rather than blindly filling in the bits and pieces of somebody else’s puzzles, successful managers need business applications that can help them actively restructure information about the specificities of their assignments, customers and clients to get work done.

Let’s take a concrete example in focusing on one of businesses’ key technological challenges today: creating virtual workspaces that will help managers leverage information technology. Forester defines an information workspace as: “a next-generation digital work environment that provides information workers of all types seamless, contextual, role-based, guided, visual multimodal, right-time access to people, content, data, voice, business processes, and eLearning.” Faced with such functional, process-centric jargon, no wonder most managers have trouble understanding exactly how information technology will improve their business…

Let’s suggest a different approach. Assume that the information workspace should be a mirror image of the workplace that we take with us wherever we happen to be working. There are six defining characteristics of the work “place”- how clearly are they reflected in business software solutions today?

• A vision that defines the meaning of work;
• Actors : the managers, employees, partners and customers that produce work;
• Interactions : the events in which we sell and purchase products, ideas and services;
• Outcomes: the generated revenue steam
• Gateways : communication channels that integrate the workspace into local context, culture and organization

Our contribution to this blog will be dedicated to conversations and stories designed to help managers leverage technology to learn about their businesses. In the weeks to come we will explore the methodologies, architectures and technologies that can be deployed today to build an accurate picture of the multiple realities of business. Fundamental questions that will be addressed include how can business applications capture experience rather than just the facts and figures? Can we extend the paradigm of search to identify patterns of behavior? What technologies today can help managers focus on non-structured data, networks and effectiveness? What are the technical requirements of applications that will capture organize and enhance individual visions, contexts and experience? In short, how can managers make a better use of information technology to learn about business?

 

ideagoras: pushing the r&d envelope

 (innovation presentation at Thales University on March 13, 2008)

This morning I delivered my speech on innovation at Thales University in the southwest of Paris for the second time since 2007. On top of the usual presentation describing what is meant by innovation, how one defines it, and what are the expectations of the clients (mainly in outsourcing), as well as the methodology for joint innovation programmes I have introduced new parts in this presentation regarding ideagoras and open innovation. An ideagora is literally a marketplace of ideas. The term was coined by Don Tapscott in his latest book, entitled wikinomics (www.wikinomics.com). This presentation of ideagoras was particularly apt; for the audience was made of a mixture of English and French r&d representatives of the Thales organisation. Thales is the result of the merger of a number of companies including Racal (payment systems) and Thomson CSF, the major defence systems provider. Thales, beyond these two sectors, is also present in the field of consulting services. The reason why ideagoras such as innocentive, or yet2.com was so important is that, in the light of my presentation, this is a revelator that the landscape for research and innovation in general, is being reshaped by the Internet, and collaboration in such an open environment. The audience was really interested in seeing how we organised ourselves at Orange, to create ideagoras internally and how much positive feedback we were getting from this. Orange’s system, entitled IDclic (literally translated, click4ideas) has received awards and praises, and is claiming 150 solved challenges and net savings worth €450,000,000 for 2007.

Obviously, in incentive is taking this concept one step higher by making innovation players penetrate into the world of open innovation. With systems like in innocentive and the like, innovation is no longer carried out by the sole representatives of research and development departments, but is actually open to external players. In the course of this presentation I gave examples of solved challenges at Solvay (a Belgian chemical manufacturer) and the BOGO (buy one get one) light bulb mentioned in Time magazine this month. As I said in my presentation, I do not think that ideagoras will take the jobs of people such as thos who were listening to the conference. More importantly, I think this will change the way that they work. They are increasingly challenged by their management be it at Thales or anywhere else, in order to produce better results and make innovation more directly profitable to the entire company. Ideagoras are a step forward in the right direction. Internal ideagoras to start with are there to ensure that people are talking to one another and that they have exploited internal competencies to the full. But external ideagoras are taking thingsfurther and they come as a complement to internal r&d. I do not believe in full innovation and product development outsourcing. It would be silly as it would deprive a company from its competitive advantage and its ability to improve and evolve its product and service lines. I believe in ideagoras coming on top of internal processes. It may even be grabbing something in the regions of 10 to 15% of current r&d budgets if all goes well. Actually, it is possible that these 10-15% will not go to one particular ideagora, but to several of them as companies will want to spread risk across different services and different communities, and they will want to use their different business models and processes.

A spin-off of Eli Lilly, innocentive is a system of crowdsourcing, where “problems are waiting for a solution”. With innocentive, seekers are asking questions and they are waiting for solvers to post their answers to their challenges. Other business models exist such as yet2.com, which is devoted to bringing “solutions in need of a problem”. I can’t think that the two models are mutually exclusive. As a matter of fact, I think they have a lot in common, and that they could be combined for greater benefit. It seems that it is the route chosen by Procter & Gamble which seem to be clients of many an ideagora.

At the end of the day, the distinction between technologically-driven innovation (solutions in need of a problem), and business-driven innovation (problems in search of a solution) is the real gist of the problem, and one which we addressed through the joint innovation programme methodology described in our White Paper. It all hinges on the need to describe innovation and what it means, and the absolute necessity to define objectives, which need to be smart (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound) objectives.

I enjoyed this presentation thoroughly, and I am looking forward to the next iteration of the technical leadership programme at Thales University.

 

persona-based marketing for ideal success

by M. H. “Mac” McIntosh, CBC

Persona-based marketing is part Hollywood and part business analytics. Construct a fictional customer–based on real-life data and intelligence–and then use that character as the touchstone for promotion and selling decisions
Mac McIntosh, The Sales and Marketing expert

Introducing our cast

Meet Joe, He’s the VP of sales of a down-sizing technology company. Joe is in his early 40s, sports a new iPhone and gets up early to work in a 4-6 mile run while he trains for long-distance races. He prefers to wear turtlenecks and high-priced jeans, donning a suit only when he has to. Joe drives a late model SUV with a booster seat in the back seat for his three-year-old son. He’s harried, and worries about the headcount of his sales force. He wants to leverage web services to increase his team’s results and reach a related vertical market, but doesn’t know where to start.

 

Has e-mail usage in the enterprise gone any better … or worse?

At first sight, the question might seem ludicrous. But in actual fact it’s not. In 1999 I wrote an article for a French online magazine related to e-mail usage in the professional sphere in which I was drawing my own conclusions after 10 years of e-mail usage both in and out of the enterprise (11 years within and 5 years without to be precise). Even then I could sense that something was going amiss with e-mail usage. I was pointing out that we had gone a long way since the introduction of Corporate e-mail systems in the mid nineteen eighties. At that time, the issue was about getting managers to answer their e-mail directly. This battle was mostly won a decade later but I was also pointing out that there was a downside to this piece of good news and that a number of bad habits had developed throughout the years which required close examination. I then proceded to describe all these examples of email abuse.

So, what is the status now that another 10 years almost have gone by? Have users become any better at using this medium? Or any worse? Has mobile e-mail made things better or caused even more aggravation? In the open Internet world, things are clear. Either you receive an email that is sollicited or it’s a spam. Boring, longish and inapropriate email requests which would be better answered by phone aren’t a real issue. Internet users just ignore them and that’s that. But in the business world, the rules of the game are radically different. For a start, most people feel under pressure when it comes to answering emails like this. These are most of the time messages aimed at covering oneself (sometimes dubbed with the not so tasteful acronym CYA, which I will not translate but feel free to click the link if you so wish). You just can’t ignore them. Something’s got to be done about them, no matter what. But the real question is: how can you avoid spilling even more oil on the fire when you do?

I have a feeling that the answer to the two above questions if I had to provide them point blank wouldn’t be positive. Real-time dictatorship is everywhere. We have to act fast, we have to do more, we have to prove more efficient, so that email overflow is supposedly a sign that our work is efficient. Well, not really in fact. Probably just the other way round. I know that there are quite a few twitterites (http://www.twitter.com is a community ‘microblogging’ platform heavily used by Web 2.0 players to exchange rapidly with their ‘followers’) around me who’d even like the damn thing killed. I’m not suggesting that. If they have a point when saying that it’s nicer to get to a social website and interact with whoever you choose to, email suppression is not an option. We need email, but surely we also need it a little differently. Consultancy firm Deloitte is one of these companies advocating ‘no e-mail Fridays’ in order to prevent employees offloading large lists tasks onto their colleagues a few minutes before the week-end. This kind of radical measure is proving two things: one that this is a sign - Deloitte aren’t alone - that this issue with email is more universal than just me getting annoyed. Secondly, that if a performing consulting group can function without e-mail at least once a week, others could too. This is as true a feasibility study as you can get. Other means of interaction exist and they aren’t too exotic.

As a result, I will soon revisit and update this article of mine on e-mail usage. Stay tuned to the visionary marketing blog for marketing & innovation. For those of you who cannot wait to read the English version, please refer to my original text in French on my main website at this url: http://visionarymarketing.com/articles/fusage-1.html (in 4 installments).

 

innovation in outsourcing: definitely not a pipe-dream

At Cisco France’s request I wrote this brief article (see per below) on the role that innovation can play in customer relationships. This article will be published shortly in the client publication, which is entitled Ciscomag. In order to write this article, I used the material developed for a previous interview carried out in September 2007 for NextTimes, which is the Orange equivalent of Ciscomag for Orange Business Services (click here to read the September issue of NextTimes, the article being on page 2).

I have added a few recent references to this core material. The main purpose of this article is to lay the stress on our clients’ requests for outsourcing and how they evolve. This is not the only goal however. In a recent article entitled, “is innovative outsourcing a pipe dream” (that title in itself in fact is causing an issue, because one wonders whether the journalist is referring to innovative outsourcing, i.e. outsourcing done differently, versus innovation within outsourcing, which is in fact the true subject), Stephanie Overby describes how difficult it is to execute on an innovation strategy within outsourcing. In essence, the future outsourced client wants his or her savings delivered (standard outsourcing savings being 20% on average, in this kind of contracts), and the vendor is therefore making a lot of promises with regard to innovation, which according to Stephanie Overby will seldom if ever be implemented. As soon as the contract is signed, the outsourcing service provider is caught in the daily woes of delivery and has literally no bandwidth left for innovation implementation. In many cases, Overby is right - and that was the case for the December client mentioned in my article (client name will remain hidden).

 

Enterprise 2.0 fear factor: Overcoming risks, uncertainties and doubts

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 …

 

Changing your marketing mindset: 12 steps to the interactive future

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.

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.

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 …

 

BASF report on Corporate Blogging

Professional blogger, expert and consultant Klaus Eck from Munich makes an announcement for a forthcoming business breakfast with BASF (a client of his) in which a report will be presented by authors Michael Scheuermann and CheeChin Liew. In this report, its authors are said to describe how to make the round peg of 2.0 collaborative communications fit into the square hole of Corporate structure and rules. I hope that Klaus will make this report (said to be written in both German and English) available soon.

To put it in the words of Klaus’s, this is certainly a very thorny issue. May take this opportunity to urge to read (or read once more) my post on the 15 Golden Rules for Web 2.0.

 

How are companies marketing online?

The evolution under way in digital marketing reflects fundamental shifts in consumer behaviour. Leveraging the digital universe now requires marketers to look beyond traditional tactics. As the Internet gains influence and online techniques take on a larger role in strategies, digital marketing may well be the next frontier for consumer engagement and marketing effectiveness.

Although there are many online tactics available to supercharge your digital marketing plan, not all of them deliver the same effectiveness or even are appropriate. It is obviously highly depending on the target audience you are trying to reach and develop relationship with, the products and services you are promoting as well as the marketing objectives you are trying to achieve.

A McKinsey Global Survey of marketing executives from around the world entitled “How companies are marketing online” offers some solid insights into the future of digital marketing together with an excellent synopsis of Web 2.0 and online tools effectiveness as well as how they are increasingly being used to develop customer engagement …

 

36 online techniques to supercharge your 2008 digital marketing plan

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 …

 

Predictions for 2008 … Eight business technology trends to watch

While every day seems to bring a whole bunch of predictions and thoughts for this new year (and the decade to come!), I have selected this excellent article from The McKinsey Quarterly entitled “Eight business technology trends to watch“. In a Nutshell, this article provides an extremely interesting overview of emerging technology-enabled trends that will shape businesses and the economy in coming years.

These trends fall within three broad categories, namely managing relationships, managing capital & assets and leveraging information in new ways, and include …

 

Long Now Foundation: slower pace, better future … well maybe

(you may also vote for this article on Marktd)

Good morning, we are on Monday, the twenty first of January zero two thousand and eight. No this isn’t a typo, but rather a sign that we are taking into account the fact that humanity still has a few millenniums to go through. Well… hopefully! [One may have doubts when one considers the dreadful status of pollution in emerging behemoths like China (and this is just a beginning; despite courageous efforts by the likes of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, there is little or no evidence that anything will be done to curb carbon emissions over there)]. Thus, focussing on the long term is what the ‘Long Now Foundation’ (a term coined by famous UK musician and innovator Brian Eno) is doing as a day job. The foundation is a think tank aimed at promoting long term thinking (by long term, the foundation member certainly don’t mean anything like 18 to 24 months). As a result their seven recommendations are that we should:

1. serve the long view (and the long viewer)
2. foster responsibility
3. reward patience
4. mind mythic depth
5. ally with competition
6. take no sides
7. leverage longevity

All which items should be heard by marketers as the foundation for increasing Corporate Responsibility in what they are doing. Needless to say that we still have a long way to go, but there are also encouraging signs that things are moving in the right direction. Yet, those of us who are endeavouring to take a lot of hindsight and put Nature above Fashion and not sacrifice Culture and the Environment on the altar of greed, may have a tough time now and again. It was my case when I received this week’s issue (Vol. 171, No. 4 dated January 2 of Time magazine Europe, the ‘briefing‘ section on page of this issue triggered a few thoughts related to that subject. In this section weirdly entitled ENVIROTECH and even more weirdly substitled Green Machines, Time describes some of the highlights of the Detroit 2008 auto show:

Detroit’s annual Auto Show displays the best and brightest prototypes for eco-friendly cars Jan. 19-27. A look at some of the top innovators from the U.S. and abroad.

• TOYOTA A-BAT Utilizes solar panels
• SAAB 9-4X BIOPOWER Runs on biofuels
• FISKER HYBRID First true electric plug-in car
• JEEP RENEGADE Gets up to 110 m.p.g.
• MERCEDES-BENZ VISION GLK Powered by a diesel engine
• LAND ROVER LRX 2-L turbodiesel

This is how huge diesel-powered SUV’s, dubbed Chelsea Tractors in London by Environmental activists, are deemed “green” (for a hint on what Diesel fumes have in store for you, please check the UK Government’s official Health and Safety Executive website). Seeing this makes you think about long term view doesn’t it.

The Long Now Foundation describes its Clock and Library project in the following way:

“Such a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well engineered, would embody deep time for people. It should be charismatic to visit, interesting to think about, and famous enough to become iconic in the public discourse. Ideally, it would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment. Such icons reframe the way people think”.

But the real question is not whether people see the clock (or A Bertrand’s photos or Nasa’s or anything else) and think it’s cool. The real point is how do go beyond this and actually do something about it. Marketing and Innovation has to go beyond this green paradox and start acting on it, or it will disappear. For those who still doubt it, I would recommend that they read Futurelab’s Alain Thys’s presentation on how Marketing committed suicide.

Let us hope that the clock is really well engineered and that we’ll keep our eyes on it all the time, there is a lot of catching up to do.

side note: many thanks to Stewart Baines from Futurity Media for telling me about the Long Now Foundation.

 

is user-friendliness a sure marketing bet?

Very often, I hear people say that you have to make your end-user’s lives easier to generate a marketing success. However paved with good intentions this statement may be, I did ask myself the question whether making users’ live easier is a sustainable marketing argument for the development of a business. Here are my thoughts on this subject:

First and foremost, I wondered whether revenue could be linked to user-friendliness and ease of use of the service? Very often, it is said that what made Apple’s success was the user-friendliness of its products. This explanation, however, is very debatable. What could be simple for a certain user, mainly because he is used to a certain feature or a certain way of doing things, may seem complex to another. And this is even true of such well-designed products as the Mac Intosh, or the iPOD. For instance, it happened to me many times that I advised new Apple buyers who were complaining about the lack of the contextual click on their new Mac mouse. I had to show them that they had to press the button for approximately one second in order to display that contextual menu. This simple gesture may seem very user-friendly to most Mac users, whereas having a two button mouse may seem very unusual and quirky to them. But to most Windows users (just a little reminder, this is 97% of the population) this way of working with a mouse is very quirky too. Can we easily conclude that these design particularities (which could be considered as great by some and quirky by others) are a good selling argument, which are sufficient to explain how successful the product was? I’m not really sure, due to the fact that there are a number of users who discover these design features after buying the products and not before.

Secondly, I’m wondering whether user-friendliness is a constant with time? As a matter of fact, I think that user-friendliness can be pictured on a curve (similar to the hype cycle curve by partner), which explains the evolution of a user and the user-friendliness factor in the course of the usage of the machine or software. By the time a user gets used to the features of the new software or the new hardware, including those which are very exotic, the end-user will become more and more exacting. A feature which might be unusual, or even useless when you start using a product for instance, may eventually prove very useful and even compulsory with time. For instance, when I started using my newly purchased HTC 7500 advantage, the 3-D communication capability seemed to me superfluous; but I started using it more and more, and then I started to dive into the complexity of the menus and options. Now, the 3-G capability of my PDA has really become irreplaceable. If I were to lose it, I would struggle goes straight away to shop and buy a flat fee subscription for 3G, because I really need this feature now. As a conclusion, what seemed complex and useless at the outset (menu configurations to connect, proxy parameters, etc) very shortly became an absolute necessity for me to connect my machine to the Internet and use it to the full.

Thirdly, it may happen that a feature, which seemed user-friendly, and convenient in the beginning, becomes useless and irritating with time. For instance, we could describe the T9 (so-called ‘predictive text’) feature on mobile phones as very useful when we discover it for the first time. When you don’t have a keyboard on your mobile phone or your smartphone and you want to type a text (short message, note, calendar entrey, etc) this feature may seem really great and useful. You start typing the beginning of the words, and then the system will fetch into the dictionary and will complete the entry. However, with time, this feature appears quirky, and even generates unwanted effects. As a result, the feature which was meant to simplify usage becomes cumbersome, superfluous, and it even gets on your nerves to a point where you actually de-activate it (as long as you are able to work your way through the menus to re-instate manual entry). Eventually, users and mostly youngsters prefer to use abbreviations, and even this weird phonetic SMS lingo to communicate. This is a good example of a feature which seemed useful in the beginning, and was meant to make users’ lives easier, but which at the end of the day is so complex that the users want to get rid of it.

Other pertinent examples can certainly come to your mind, but as a conclusion of these brief article, I can add that user-friendliness is probably what is the most difficult thing to achieve in this world, because it is both subjective and personal (what seems easy for one may seem difficult to others) and because it evolves with time, with the usage of the system in one way or another. At the end of the day design can be a hell paved with good intentions, where user-friendliness and simplicity is aimed at but where one generates a lot of irritation and frustration. Most importantly, because this criterion is very subjective, it would probably generate a halo effect if we were to try and measure its impact on sales and revenues, or even worse if we were to predict future revenues based on user-friendliness. Conversely, we can certainly find a very good number of products or services, which went through huge commercial success despite the fact their usability was really bad or even downright awful (one will remember. Siemens’ Gigaset telephones, which were tremendously successful from a commercial point of view a few years ago whereas their menus were absolutely useless; for instance turning on your speaker phone required that you pressed the ‘INT’ key and then press eight for what it means!?). I hope that this article however is not going to entice manufacturers to make lives even more difficult for users, because I think this is hard enough as it is.

However, and however much we regret it, we think it would be wrong to believe that user-friendliness and the quality of a user manuals is a recipe for success.

 

google maps on mobiles: the path to user-friendliness

Google is now offering a new version of its Google maps application, which enables location-based information. If your device is 3G/3G+ enabled, you will be able to activate your position on the map using the new ‘my location feature‘ (a little less precise than GPS but who cares). You can also catch a glimpse of what Google has in store for maps display with the new Android system at this url.

Beyond the gadget - in fact, a very useful gadget for now I never travel dosmestically or even abroad without taking my ‘maps’ with me - what Google teaches us here is yet another lesson on user-friendliness and marketing mainly. Google maps is in fact, a good example of how an application, which is in fact not as feature rich as other applications (such as the popular Tomtom GPS navigator for instance) can prove eventually more useful and more user-friendly. At the end of the day, Google is sort of repeating what they did with the search engine when they reinvented it in 1997.

When Google launched what was to become the search engine that more than 80% of us use, instead of adding features, they started withdrawing them. With Google maps, there is no voice guidance and no 3-D representations of the terrain. Of course it displays the satellite pictures of the ground (this is really popular altough utterly useless, but it is so entertaining, one cannot help activate it from time to time), and the newest version even includes a bird’s eye view of the terrain showing mountains and hills. But it’s the sheer simplicity of the maps and the navigation and also the ability to show directions in a very user-friendly and simple way, which is making Google maps the ideal application for those who are using public transport, and don’t want to carry a heavy and bulky A-Z with them.

This thought will take us to another article, which we will write shortly, on the subject of user-friendliness in design and products.