Social Marketing: The Age of Self

“There’s people doing frightfully well, there’s others on the shelf […] this is the age of Self” Robert Wyatt

We’re in 2012 and 8 years after O’Reilly coined the 2.0 moniker, I still find people who are asking me whether ‘social’ is new in marketing. Yet, while certain people are still asking themselves questions, the world is moving fast; even though the path may be chaotic. More than anything else, brands will have to work on their social capital and what Edouard Austin (who works in my team at Orange) is calling the ‘digital self’. This is the modern marketing conundrum: how to be oneself and develop one’s digital self without being self-absorbed and self-obsessed. More with Edouard’s report of the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit which took place in London a few days ago:

Adobe Digital Marketing Summit London 2012 : The Digital Self

For its 2012 edition, the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit saw roughly 2000 enthusiasts converge in London, in the heart of the soothing Battersea Park, for two days of learning, sharing and discovering of new, more efficient ways for digital marketers, publishers and advertisers to reach out to their customers. Alongside a passionate team of French bloggers, including Fred Cavazza, Nicolas Malo, Carole Da Silva, Laurent Evain and Florian Giudicelli, I arrived at the impressive venue and was immediately stunned by the scale of the event : 37 countries represented, 30 partners co-sponsoring the event, members of the press from all over the world and a future-like decoration which led me to think I was embarking on some kind of out-of-this-world experience. And actually, it wasn’t far from it !

Read the whole report here…

wikipedia by numbers

A little while ago, I published a series of articles about Wikipedia, following a conference which took place last October in Amsterdam. Thanks to the open-site.org website, here is a little illustration of the prominence of the online encyclopaedia. Worthy of note is the fact that, after a long and passionate battle, encyclopaedia Britannica has eventually gone out of print. It is now restricted to its online version(s). All those extraordinary numbers exposed in this infographics should not force us to overlook some of the shortcomings embedded in the online Cyclopaedia, as explained and detailed in my article available at http://bit.ly/waleswm2

Via: Open-Site.org

Verizon: using crowdsourcing to get products right – or wrong

A few weeks ago in San Francisco, I attended the fiftieth Blogwell presentation since the beginning. Laurie Shook is portfolio leader at Verizon, a leading US telecom operator. She is a product marketer who uses social media, not a social media expert and she even describes herself as a “marketeer with a passion for Social Media” on her LinkedIn profile.

Verizon’s Idea exchange was developed in July 2010, as a place for customers to exchange ideas about services and things that customers would like Verizon to do. The platform provides means for ranking ideas. It is “semi-anonymous” Laurie said and “gives the idea to people that they can speak freely” she added. In a nutshell, it is n opportunity for Verizon clients to express themselves and “it’s also a great opportunity for marketers” Laurie said.

HD TV high on the agenda

“Many customers comment on HD TV and mostly on TV programs. “They said for instance that they’d like to see certain channels in HD or hide channels which they aren’t subscribed to and Verizon subsequently implemented that option” she said.

There are all kinds of ideas on that platform though and some of them are content related. Customers vote and propose ideas and sometimes they even propose to vote against ideas which they oppose.

913 ideas received 280+ launched

Laurie went on describing a business case study:  the “IMG 1.9” plan; IMG is the abbreviation for “interactive media guide”. “There is one release a year, it’s a lot of work and once we’re done, we involve 100 customers before launching it” Laurie said. “Last summer [2011], we extended the HD channel guide, hid unsubscribed channels, added DVR chapter selection and made the channel guide softer and easier on the eyes. That was based on feedback : ‘made fonts bigger, change the background etc.’”

Yet, even though a majority “loved the ideas”, things weren’t so easy since there also were other users who were “very vocal and critical”. Some didn’t hesitate to post comments such as “you really screwed up your tv guide” Laurie said.

what do you do with negative feedback?

The next question is familiar to any marketer in charge of communities. “what do you do with that kind of feedback?” Should you ignore it, or make it a priority? Laurie’s answer makes perfect sense:

“You don’t respond immediately. Sometimes, people are pissed off with change and you have to wait for the dust to settle. Acknowledge the status and wait. However, the post became popular, and even the most popular on the platform” Laurie went on.

facilitation tips from Verizon

She admitted to not finding this very pleasant but you have to bite the bullet and you also have to respond she said. Here are her recommendations:

1. “Cool you jets before responding” (remain cold-blooded, there is no need to heat up and start an online battle)
2. “It’s best not to respond immediately and to respond with the medium” (i.e. Idea Exchange rather than choose another tool)
3. “a personalised response is necessary” such as “I’m sorry you are not of the same mind … and we will work to make you happy again”

are early innovators biased?

“Maybe it was an execution issue or a community bias, whereby people who join forums are early innovators and do not represent customers. Maybe the rank and file TV viewers aren’t represented?” Laurie went on “but when that guy commented, we had more people joining”. Laurie suggested that there was some sort of Hawthorne effect in reverse and that conclusions had to be drawn from that experiment with regard to crowdsourcing and how much hindsight you should introduce when conducting such projects.

on the positive side

Beyond this bias, there are some positive conclusions to be drawn from that experiment Laurie added. Here is what she thinks has worked for Verizon:

1. faster customer feedback (before Idea exchange  there were disconnects but you didn’t know why or how or how much. “With direct feedback, you know immediately and you understand much better” she added)
2. nuances of customer opinions are highlighted
3. there is an incentive for more focus on customer priorities
4. there are customer expectations of “Internet time” and this forces a large organisation to do things more quickly

Laurie added that “this example is strictly consumer-orientated, and that Verizon business is working with customer advisory boards, in a much more face-to-face format”.

social media will be part of everything we do

On May 16, I attended and delivered a keynote at the Ronewmedia conference in Bucharest, the capital of Romania. Ronewmedia will actually change names, in order to become ICEEFEST, that is to say the Interactive Central and Eastern European Festival. The change is far from being trivial. As Dragos Stanca, founder of Ronewmedia states  in his introduction – click front page on the left: Social Media is no longer new, it’s not just about media and the conference has gained enough momentum to gather people from all the region (there were representatives from many other Central and Eastern European countries among the delegates as well as from Western Europe and America). I had prepared an interview for them, which was published in their magazine. Here it is:

How important is social media now for companies and brands ?

Well, to start with, social media is not something new at Orange. We’ve been working around this subject, whether it be content marketing around blogs and stuff like that, or social networks and internal social networks, for more than five years. So it’s really important, and we’re now in the third stage of the development of social media at our company.

The first stage was around convincing management that something had to be done, so we had to prove a point, and prove a concept really : “we’ve done this and that, and it works”. Then the second stage was around the development of our communities. To an extent, a lot of companies are still there at this moment. They’re trying to develop their fans base to the maximum, but we’re not really there anymore, it’s something of the past. Now we’ve moved on to another stage which is the structuring of our social media initiatives, whether it be at group level or country level.

Social media is in everything we do : marketing, product marketing, customer relationship management and communications of course, but not only, so it’s really important to us.

And how do you see the role of social media in the near future ?

I see it as really evolving. I see the future of social media a bit like the future of the Internet. When we were talking about the Internet 15 years ago, we were talking about something which was done for experts. So a certain number of people, usually geeks, were doing that stuff and nobody else understood it.

Now, the Internet is in everything we do. You can’t actually think about doing marketing without doing online marketing. I even know companies which are in B2B for instance, and do nothing else but online marketing, because it’s more effective, it’s cheaper, it’s better, it’s faster… So, even for B2C companies, online has now become part of everything we do, and social media will be just like that. I suspect that within three to five years, we won’t talk about social media anymore. And I think one of the future aspects of it is that you won’t have a social media in one particular social media team, but it will be spread across the entire organization.

So how does Orange manage its social media activity ?

To start with, the social media activity at Orange group is something which is very dynamic and which involves a lot of people. I think there are about 200 people in charge of community management at Orange, at different levels, in different parts of the organization in all parts of the world. We have 35 countries, and Orange Business Services in 220 countries and territories.

Most of my role is about the coordination of this. It’s not something which you can actually scale at Group level, so it wouldn’t make sense for us to manage social media for the entire world, it wouldn’t be possible for anyone to do this. What we do is liaise and create some sort of network of people working on social media in the whole world.

So what does that mean at Group level ?

At group level it means we have a team here which is aimed at developing our social media presence and traction, as engagement is very important, but not just in isolation. We work on social media engagement in order to support our other online activities and content strategy. So I don’t think that social media as something being separate from the rest of the digital online activities; on that level, from the website down to Pinterest, everything is covered by the team. We don’t have one special community manager on each and every platform; we actually manage several communities and link everything together, which makes it easier.

Another part of our work, which is probably more than 50% of what we do, is to work on coordination and governance, and liaise with others through what we call the “Social Media Champions”. This program is aimed at turning all our employees into ambassadors for the group and the brand, as long as they want it.

So how do you personally use social media for your job ?

I’ve been using social media for quite a long time now. I’ve been writing online for 17 years, and if I consider the rise of social media in 2004, then I’ve been using social media ever since, beginning with Linkedin, and then Twitter, in the year 2006 or 2007, and then Facebook and other tools. In fact, I use social media all the time, and it probably means that I work all the time!

I use it a lot for my business and for a variety of things; in fact, it’s a bit like my backbone. Social networks and social activity is the backbone of marketing. Marketing is about talking to people, interacting with people: be they customers, vendors or your peers, you want to exchange with these people.

Before I come to work in the morning, I usually write on my blog, www.visionarymarketing.com, and I’ve been doing this for a long time now and honestly, I wouldn’t understand life without this, because everything you want to do you want to share with people. So sharing is my middle name…

And so what are the major benefits of using social media in your private life ?

The fact is I use very little social media in my private life. I do a lot of e-reputation and work on contact management and content which I’m interested in, like marketing and e-marketing for instance, which are my main subjects.

The most personal things I do on social media is probably my blog about paintings, pictures and photographs and not much else really. I tend to use the Internet for personal reasons in a very limited way. I don’t want to mix up my personal and professional life, and I usually tend to keep private things private. For example when I take pictures of buildings, architecture or landscapes, then I put them online and I share them on Picasa mainly or Flickr. Then they go through all the blogs, Twitter and everything else. And I use Instagram a lot of course. If I take pictures of people, then I don’t share them, it’s as simple as that.

So to conclude, do you have any advice to give regarding the use of social media in a professional environment ?

Your professional environment is something you have to be very careful about. You always have to give a positive image of what you do. So if you really feel like tweeting something dodgy, then just don’t do it.

• download a summarised pdf version of RONEWMEdia Magazine including a printed version of this interview

video interview: social media at Orange in a nutshell

I prepared this series of video interviews in order to prepare myself for the Ronewmedia conference in Bucharest, Romania. In those 3 interviews, I describe what I do at Orange,our philosophy and where we think the wold of Corporate social media is going.

10 Major Trends In Corporate Social Media Management (2/2)

http://oran.ge/10smtrends

This is part 2 of a two-part piece dedicated to the major trends in coroporate social media management, which will serve as a basis for my presentation in Bucharest at the ronewmedia digital conference due to take place on May 16th, 2012. I will use my 5 years of practice in that field at Orange and dwell on some of the major trends impacting Social Media and its management in large corporations. My presentation will highlight these trends which will be illustrated with real life examples taken from the field.

[photo Yann Gourvennec, cc 2012 http://bit.ly/picasayann]

Trend number 6: clients want direct interaction to take place on social media 

We have been debating about social CRM for quite a while now. It has always been my view that there was no such thing as social CRM but that it had to be a means for customer relationship to add one more channel to its current toolbox. However, this is more than just an additional channel. It is a channel which forces customer relationship management departments to better handle customer requests and complaints. On social media, it is no longer possible to hide direct interaction. It is immediately visible to all. At the same time, a survey carried out by orange business services in France has shown that the requirement for customers to interact with real people is of paramount importance to these customers. I see this as a real opportunity to make “social CRM” really useful insofar as it is happening in real time and cannot be hidden or postponed and therefore thi fulfils the requirement expressed  by customers.

Trend number 7: enterprise social networks are certainly the future, but we are not there yet

The future of social media isn’t where you believe it is. The internal part of enterprise collaboration (aka enterprise social networks) is probably the line of business on which the biggest numbers will be made at least according to Gartner. There is no doubt that you will hear far less noise about the new version of SharePoint or Lotus Notes or blueKiwi than the recent takeover of instagram by Facebook (see trend number 10). However, we’re still a long way from implementing social networks inside organisations in a seamless manner. Such implementations are fraught with social issues (often, it’s employees who actually feel reluctant to use internal social networks rather than management, and the latter are sometimes unable to explain that internal social networks are here to help them and not spy on them) as well as many implementation issues. It is far from being accessory. For people like me in charge of external social networks and websites, the use of the internal social network is of paramount importance if one wants to find help and support internally. Things are moving forward but a lot remains to be done  and things are far from being perfect. As often, technology isn’t the major issue.

Trend number 8: turning one’s employees – not just community managers – into brand advocates

Working with external bloggers is nice, having community managers who have become experts in the facilitation of social media communities is not bad either, training one’s communications managers on the use of second generation web collaboration techniques and platforms is also nice (and Orange is doing this and I am actually the sponsor of this initiative), but we cannot think that we have achieved our goals until we have managed to convince most of our staff to become – if they so wish – our brand advocates. In our case, it is particularly challenging given the fact that we are 170,000 employees around the world, scattered around more than 35 countries, and 220 countries and territories if we include Orange Business Services. This is why I believe in this initiative that we are launching at this moment, which we are naming “social media champions”, the details of which are explained on our social media guidelines page online: http://orange.com/smg

Trend number 9: social media strategists will have to / must deal with the proliferation of social media platforms, due to peer pressure and self-fulfilling prophecies initiated online and/or by the Press   

This isn’t as easy as it seems. Everyday or so, a new platform is born, which creates a huge buzz on the web and puts considerable pressure on web teams within large organisations. Can we, or can we not, ignore Pinterest for instance? Depending on our line of business, positioning, or even just the number of resources that are available to us, the response to that question may vary; yet there is a strong probability that you will not be able to evade the question, for fear of being taken for a twit or a has-been, or even because of internal pressure too. Yet, with the hardening of the current crisis, we would probably have to learn how to say no… human resources and time cannot be expanded without limits even though our “champions” (see trend number eight) can help.

Trend number 10: the new bubble is coming, the signs are worrying

During the first dot com bust, between the year 1999 and 2001, there was no shortage of pundits who would tell you, a calculator in their hands, that the so-called “new economy” was real and that the gross market cap over evaluations of the period were justified. The fact of the matter is that they were right insofar as there was really something new happening for which many of the benefits are only reaped nowadays. However, there were wrong in the evaluation of certain companies, and they had even lost common sense in more than many cases. We now know what happened next. To a large extent, this is also what we are witnessing today. There is no question as to the amazing success of Facebook, even to a certain extent as a platform for advertising. I am still flabbergasted however to see the Facebook – or any of the other platforms – is not trying to make money out of the numerous brands which are now thriving on their platforms whereas in fact it would make perfect sense for an enterprise to pay for the service as it offers considerable publicity for them and helps maintain the service. A premium version of Twitter for instance, which would offer multilingual support, would be something I’d be ready to pay for because we need it. Yet, the battle has shifted to the stock market, IPOs and new Web entrepreneurs who make no money but are ready to “flip it” as  they say in the Valley. People never learn. The valuation of Facebook itself at anything between $90-$100 billion seems over the top. Even the fact that the company (even before it launched on the NASDAQ) has been able to take over Instagram (and God knows I love Instagram) for $1 billion even though it is only made of less than 10 people and hasn’t started to generate a penny worth of revenue is a worrying sign that something wrong is happening … again; naysayers would probably say that a bubble his buying another bubble … Sensible Web managers have to look after this kind of things and prepare for the future, that is to say protect themselves from current excesses as well as future excesses in any direction. Despite what people think, Web assets are developed in the long run, not with platforms which come and go; stability is of the essence.

10 Major Trends In Corporate Social Media Management (1/2)

http://oran.ge/10smtrends

8 years after its introduction – and a few name changes – Corporate Social Media can no longer be considered as an innovation. We have clearly hit the third wave of its implementation in Corporate environments, that is to say the structuring of collaborative web initiatives in order to scale in multi-billion dollar companies (and smaller companies. In this piece which will serve as a basis for my presentation in Bucharest at the ronewmedia digital conference due to take place on May 16th, 2012. I will use my 5 years of practice in that field at Orange and dwell on some of the major trends impacting Social Media and its management in large corporations. My presentation will highlight these trends which will be illustrated with real life examples taken from the field.

[diagram: 3 stages in social media, Kabla & Gourvennec, 2011]

First and foremost, it has to be confirmed that this is definitely the end of the beginning of social media in large enterprises. Almost 10 years after the invention of Web 2.0 and its deployment in enterprises, brands are no longer toying with the idea of jumping on the band waggon, but are rather busy at structuring and streamlining their initiatives. In our book (“social media talked to my boss” published in Paris in 2011, the English adaptation of which is in progress, the working title being “social media from the trenches”), Hervé Kabla and myself were already emphasising the need for a third stage in the implementation of social media (structuring).

This statement is even more true nowadays with the advent of a second wave of a very serious European economic crisis, to a certain extent a lot deeper and harder than the one that struck in 2009, even though the numbers related to the growth in GDP are – so far – less ominous. As a matter of fact, that crisis is beginning to wear thick on the allocation of marketing budgets (even though digital is still considered low cost by most) and to an extent it is a good opportunity to streamline our processes and curb a few excesses.

As we are working towards this streamlining phase, which is definitely on the agenda at Orange where I manage social media and digital for the group, I feel 10 major trends coming to the fore in 2012. Here they are, in random order, based on my experience in the field:

trend number 1: mobile devices/iPad (and not tablets) are becoming obligatory, whether you like it or lump it

this statement is less obvious than it may seem. I have noticed as I was attending many meetings with my peers in the digital world recently, that few actually knew how many of their users were looking at their websites via a mobile device. Facts and figures related to my website orange.com (anything between 1.2 and 1.5 million monthly uniques) are however very clear: since 2011, it’s more than 15% of our users who have gone mobile. Yet, something new has happened in that area. I mean the proportion of iPads (and I don’t mean tablets in general) which are being used by our readers. In essence, twice as many iPads as there are iPhones, in themselves by far the most used of smartphones as far as our readers are concerned! Without judging, the amount of the audience using android devices is very fragmented, non-iPad tablets being completely invisible in my statistics. These numbers are not neutral when it comes to designing websites or adapting social media platforms for brand purposes, and let alone when it comes to the socialisation of traditional websites which is another major trend which we have observed (per below).

Trend number 2: content marketing is no longer a gadget, it has become central to our strategies

I often tell the story about my beginnings at orange business services when I started to introduce business blogging and started recruiting experts among our ranks. The first few reactions which I got at the time were “we are not the New York Times!” Whereas I do agree with that statement and wouldn’t even venture to compare blogs to eminent news pages, everybody who’s been working in the web industry for at least a little while understands that the web is fuelled with content. Internet content, and particularly user generated content (UGC) has become central to our content driven strategies nowadays and is no longer debated. This is the case also at Orange where we have been able to impose many of these platforms such as orange – innovation.TV, the feed (UK), le collectif (France), as well as live.orange.com and very soon orange inside which will be available directly on the main orange.com portal (see our major trend devoted to curation). Not to mention the Orange Business Services blog which I created more than four years ago. These sources of information are now part of our communications landscape, are no longer seen as a gadget, and are directly incorporated within the enterprise and embedded in its DNA.

Trend number 3: social media has changed the way one hires new employees … for ever

Due to sociological, structural and organisational changes, the good old resume has become largely obsolete. In Canada alone more than 90% of jobseekers are using social media to find for a new employer. There is no reason why employers, this side of the Atlantic or anywhere else, should do anything else either. At a time when Monster is going through a rough patch, one could actually say that LinkedIn has killed the traditional resume and the way that one used to look for a job in the past. I won’t complain about it personally. I have always found degrading the practice of sending one’s curriculum vitae through the post so that it would end up in an unknown anonymous pile of 2000 resumes.

Social media and e-reputation now enable employees to “sell” themselves online, without having as if they were brands. Eight years after its release, LinkedIn is now slowly but surely becoming the world’s online and rich media resume. To a large extent this changes the way companies too are using social media, and the impact on HR strategies being driven by digital and how they attract new candidates is of paramount importance.

Tools like LinkedIn, Viadeo, Xing and Vkontakte in Russia and even Facebook are becoming unavoidable.

trend number 4: curation (in the noble sense of the term) can become a major asset for companies which are into content marketing

“curation”, is not a term of which I have always been fond. In the beginning, curation very often meant that people would actually steal your content using RSS feeds not quote the author and plonk the content back into their own blogs or platforms, without having to pay tribute to anyone. Whenever you came back to them they would answer something like “Oh! there is nothing I can do about it, this is just the platform you know; it’s automatic!” Even though the statement was feeble, there was indeed very little you could do about it. However, may be with a little help from the Google penguin (and before Panda) algorithm, one managed to do away with most of content aggregation platforms, and now original content is back on the agenda; content producers can at last reap the harvests they have sown. As a matter of fact, certain platforms have either disappeared or been taken over (like summify which was taken over by Twitter and for which new user registrations are now closed) while others have matured considerably. I would for instance dwell on the scoop’it platform, a Franco-American start-up, which has always taken great care at promoting original content through its curation technology rather than steal it. In early June 2012, Orange will release a new curation platform powered by Scoop’it in order to fuel is brand-new inside orange dynamic site. There will be a dual stage curation process on Insife Orange : first aggregating internal Orange content throughout the world (23 different RSS feeds) and second proposing external content curated by the team. Platform will be available at inside.orange.com.

Trend number 5: beyond the fan page

a year ago, I was already announcing that the future would not be for brands to develop bigger and bigger and bigger fan pages, even though some analysts are still stuck with a measurement of the number of fans on brand names therefore triggering a silly competition for which customers pay very little interest. Engagement rates on these fan bases are smaller and smaller, and the bigger the fan base, the smaller the engagement rate. With the advent of Facebook timeline, discussions are now even less visible on brand fan pages. The future will be about the capitalisation on such discussion platforms in order to create second to none content, which readers would want to share on their own spaces. This has now become reality on most content websites which already incorporate what is now known as Facebook opengraph and Facebook connect (not to mention Twitter and LinkedIn connect etc). Sharing buttons are now trivial and are not even part of the debate any more. Even though it has taken us a little bit of time to implement it (in fact we didn’t just change the website, we overhauled the entire platform), this vision is really central to the new orange.com website which we will release at the end of May, as well as it enhancements in mid June.

to be continued on Visionary Marketing …

Amex wants to turn tweets into dollars

In March 2012, Amex decided to introduce a new plan (https://sync.americanexpress.com/twitter/Index) in order to turn its customers’ tweets into rewards. Participating brands include 1-800flowers.com, Best buy, Dell and H&M. Here is how Amex describes the service:

• Sync your eligible American Express^® Card with Twitter
• Tweet the special offer #hashtags to load exclusive Cardmember offers directly to your Card
• Save with an automatic statement credit when you make a qualified purchase in store or online with your synced Card

It’s mostly aimed at customers in the US and doesn’t seem to be available to European American Express clients. I couldn’t spot it either on the UK or France pages.

The idea is clever as it mainly touts the benefits of not having to use coupons. The main challenge will however remain, as always in e-marketing, with the ability to offer a great service (and big discounts) while reassuring clients that they are free to choose and opt-out (or even not opt-in at all).

Amex Video promoting the Sync Tweet and Save programme

mobility in retail industry: main security challenges and prospects

This is an original guest post by Roger Hockaday (picture below and bio at the end of this piece), Aruba Networks. Aruba’s Atmosphere Corporate blog is dedicated to mobile devices. Aruba Networks is a leading provider of next-generation network access solutions for the mobile enterprise (disclosure: Aruba Networks is also a North American customer of my company, Orange)

Risk and Reward: Tablets and Smartphones in Secure Retail

The introduction of smartphones and tablets into the retail environment brings great rewards to the forward looking retailers. They present a disruptive technology and provide an opportunity to innovate both front-of-store and back-of-store operations, yet they also introduce new security risks if their adoption is not properly developed.

The iPad, Android tablets (large and small) and iPod Touches or smartphones are altering the retail experience around the world. Retailers are the midst of a point-of-sale (PoS) transformation from terminals to smartphones and tablets. In fact, many retailers have started embracing them as best practice and, according to a recent poll (Aruba Networks 2012 Retail Survey), 56% of retailers plan to use iPads for Point of Sale in the next two years.

[source: the Aruba networks 2012 retail survey full results at http://bit.ly/arubaretail]

Sales executives in car showrooms use tablets to engage better with prospective customers, remaining by the car to access colour charts, model specification and instantly check stock levels without having to return to their desk. One well known US department store identified the challenge of walk-away customers in the shoe department as sales associates went to bring stock to the customers. The retailer justified the costs associated with the use of tablets by sales assistants simply to prevent customer walk-away as the assistant could now check stock levels, order shoes to be brought onto the sales floor, or offer alternates should the first choice item be unavailable, all while remaining with the customer.

To enable the use of tablets and smartphones in retail it is of course necessary to deploy in-store wireless (more than 50% of retailers surveyed intend this) but this requires a significant overhaul of the legacy networks first put into stores just to facilitate back-office functions such as stock-checking.

The last few years have already seen wireless networks extend onto the sales floor to support Point-of-Sale (hence the need to meet Payment Card Industry standards to protect cardholder and authentication data), but it is a more challenging proposition to support tablets for sales assistants, and even more to offer hotspot services to shoppers (as planned by 37% of retailers by the end of 2014).

In-store wireless enables a new set of mobile applications to allow retailers to engage even further with customers; applications that can push information to customer smartphones and iPads as they walk in the door enabling them to download rich content when and where they want. Combined with store associates empowered to access stock data and process transactions with tablets, it all adds up to an outstanding customer experience.

The challenge is how to manage this expansion of devices, users and applications on the retail network.

Front-of-store wireless requires pervasive coverage (there’s no secret to making a wireless network that works; good coverage combined with proven RF management tools and a management platform that provides real time visibility into the coverage, device location and application performance). The ‘secret sauce’ for retailers is the choice of platform used to manage the discovery of devices on the network, the provisioning of large numbers of devices and users without overwhelming the IT department, the ability deliver guest access with advertising, and delivery of context-based / role based connectivity.

[souce: ibid.]

While the cardholder associations of PCI (PCI standing for Payment Card Industry, with companies such as AMEX, VISA and MasterCard) require different levels of compliance based on transaction volumes, the use of Wi-Fi in an organisation brings a layer of requirements that the retailer must comply with.

Role-based access (as required in PCI DSS) can be as simple as separating employees from customers (or guests). However, in order to provide a more flexible infrastructure it is more logical to create roles based not just on the person (employee, manager, customer), but also the device (iPad, smartphone, handheld scanner), the location (retail outlet, hotspot, corporate office), and application (PoS, database, Internet access). This more holistic approach – one that understands the context in which the network is being used will ultimately provide a more flexible and efficient wireless network than one that simply separates employees from customers.

Security, capacity and flexibility will become the watch-words of the next generation in-store networks. Security to comply with the needs of PCI DSS, capacity to meet the needs of employees and customers using tablets and smartphones, and flexibility to cope with the new applications and rapid changes needed to work in a competitive environment. Tomorrow’s retail network will be very different to yesterdays.

read more

• the Aruba Networks retail survey with full results at http://bit.ly/arubaretail
• using Wifi security on mobile phones and devices
• my report on Kaspersky’s statement about mobile crime at MWC
• Kate Bourdet’s own wrap up of mobile security at MWC
• an interview with Roger Hockaday at IP EXPO ONLINE

about the author

Roger Hockaday is Director of Marketing, Aruba Networks, EMEA. A former executive of Alcatel, Infoblox and Packeteer he is currently responsible for developing end user opportunities and channels to market in the secure government communications sector across EMEA for Aruba Networks.

Is Sir Berners Lee’s view one-sided?

today’s selection is …

A report from Edouard Austin in my team at Orange who was attending the WW2012 keynote speech by one of the Web’s founders, Sir Tim Berners Lee who issued a clear warning as to the growing threat to freedom of speech on the Internet. In that speech, he addresses a clear comment to Mark Zuckerberg who announced a few years ago that “privacy was no longer a social norm”. Whereas the growing threat to freedom of speech is a non debatable and an increasingly worrying threat, I would venture to say that this keynote fails to address the other side of the issue and the fact that the lack of regulations has also impinged the rights of others and namely those of artists, sometimes in favour of thieves who have amassed humongous fortunes. I know that this is a debatable issue but as much as I have been a proponent of the free Internet and online freedom of speech from day one – i.e. for the past 17 years – I can’t believe that anything can be done. Or at least I believe that the two sides of the issues have to be analysed and debated, and freedom of speech placed within the sound borders established by the law (you know, that old-fashioned thing one used to abide to). As a matter of fact, I am a firm believer in free speech and open creativity but I am not convinced that copying and endorsing illegally others’ content is an option.

Web founder warns of lack of freedom online

Keynote speaker at the World Wide Web 12 in Lyon, the founder of the Web Sir Tim Berners-Lee shared his growing concerns regarding the freedom and liberties of the web.

“It is a danger to national security for a country to have information about all the people stored on one disk”. As I arrived (late) inside the imposing lecture theatre of the Cité Internationale, sir Tim Berners-Lee was just beginning to underline the dangers of the web for democracy today. “It’s not only the open market which depends on an open Internet, but democracy, human discourse”.

The founder of the Web is growing worried about the amount of confidential information circulating on the web and the way personal data can be used by companies or politics. The Internet must remain a platform for innovation and creation but Berners-Lee insists on the fact that “we have to be alert. 90% of the time, we have to spend creating, doing cool things and innovating, but 10% of the time, we have to spend protecting the platform we do it on”.

via Web founder warns of lack of freedom online | live Orange blog – Orange events blog.

learn from the savviest European social media practitioners … and save £ 100 on ticket price

I will be taking part in the oncoming Social Media B2C Marketing Summit due to take place in London, on June 25th and 26th and as I am preparing for the event, I took a few moments to dig my teeth into the programme and I realised it’s not a conference but the conference on European Social Media … absolutely packed with extremely high profile social media managers from some of the most prominent European brands. It was high time something was done to catch up with the likes of Blogwell in the USA, and here it is, right at our door, so it’s an event you shouldn’t miss.

the pitch

The Social Media Marketing Summit (25-26 June, London UK)
Social media represents a growing marketing opportunity for business to directly engage with their consumers. The phenomenal growth of social media activity has meant consumers are now interacting with their favourite brands and regularly checking for the latest updates online.

Orange, Heineken, Unilever and KLM are a selection of brands which have embedded social media throughout their marketing campaigns. Join these leading brands on the 25-26th June at the 2012 Social Media Marketing Summit, London.

Learn how to deliver engaging and interactive marketing tactics to entice your consumers to engage with your brand. O2, Honda, Tom Tom, Barclaycard and many more will share exclusive case studies, their everyday experiences and best practice, so you can improve your social media marketing efforts.

£100 off ticket price

Quote YG12 and save an £100 you register at http://bitly.com/Socialreg

about my presentation at the summit

Orange has been very active in the Social Media space since early 2008 and now has an online fanbase of over 3 million fans. With a presence on Twitter,
Google+ and Dailymotion – in which Orange has a stake – Orange has experience in using multiple networks – and insight on which networks are best for different kinds of marketing. Hear how this telecoms giant chooses different social platforms to engage with their community and meet marketing goals.

• how to decide which tools work for you : hear how Orange decides which social network works best for them and how you can decide depending on your organisations goals.
• learn which social platforms are most effective to market your brand and build brand awareness:  Orange will share which worked best for them and why
• hear why Orange doesn’t just rely on Facebook and Twitter: discover which other social networks you should be using and how these can help your online marketing.

him who helped Obama become President with Social Media

today’s selection is…

Edouard Austin’s post on my Live.Orange.com blog in which Thomas Gensemer explains how he helped Barack Obama in the 2008 US Presidential campaign 

 In 2008, Thomas Gensemer, CEO of Blue State Digital, was in charge of the digital campaign for Barack Obama during the presidential election in the United States.

This year, he is once again involved in the campaign, but before the hard part begins, Thomas paid a visit to the Orange headquarters in Paris to explain how the social web can help with modern day politics, and how these skills could be applied to the corporate world. In the last ten years, the rapid growth of digital has given politicians new and more efficient tools to reach and connect with voters.

>> read on at live.orange.com

Hitachi: making social media work for B2B

Sharon Crost is Global Online Marketing and Social Media Manager at Hitachi Data Systems and she delivered what I believe is one of the most inspiring presentations on March 27 at Blogwell in San Francisco and it’s no surprise to me ( who already made a presentation at an earlier edition of Blogwell in Atlanta a couple of years ago) that B2B is one of the major targets for social media. Here is why, in 5 questions, asked by Sharon to the riveted Blogwell audience.

“HDS products (left) are not sexy” was Sharon’s introduction to her pitch at Blogwell. It doesn’t seem very intuitive that social media could work out for products like that. Yet, it proved very rewarding for the storage and data recovery company. In just five questions, Sharon proved her case very compellingly. Here is my account of her punchy presentation.

Question 1: is social media a good investment?

Although many of the people in the room anticipated the answer to that question to be a “yes”, Sharon explained that they “were not so sure at first sight because it’ wasn’t an obvious thing”. So they “needed to test it out” she went on. Being a B2B company, they didn’t have much of a presence at first and even with a very small budget, which was used very effectively they managed to get some very good results.

They started with a test of a quiz campaign in which they tried to get people to engage on social media. The prize was a Hitachi LCD HD TV set. This campaign drew people to their social site to answer the quiz. Another campaign was the “globe campaign” and you had to spin the globe and click on the tweets, the whitepapers etc. A third one was entitled “a quest for scalability”…

Sharon concluded that first chapter by saying that “the first lesson is to think about what is socially sharable about your brand and this may not necessarily be your products!”.

[photo cc by Yann Gourvennec http://bit.ly/picasayann]

Q2: if people aren’t in the target market, should you discourage them?

Her answer was neither yes or no this time. “In fact you have to be nice to everyone (you never know), but you have to treat them nicely but differently”. For people in our targets we let them win a “storage assessment” she added; those who won TV sets were kept happy but they weren’t forcibly part of HDS’ audience.

The current campaign is a storage mapping tool. People can still engage to win an iPad “but they aren’t the target audience” Sharon added. Target customers or prospective customers are also given a chance to opt-in for free information.

Q3: can you do that on a shoestring?

Sharon’s answer is a resounding Yes! (and all voted for that answer in the room). Earned is the most important part, but “paid” comes to amplify the message.

Q4 which one works best? Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook?

The answer to that question is very counter-intuitive and it must be pointed out that it might very well work differently depending on the brand or mostly, where it’s based. The very footprint of Facebook in the US is making it unavoidable. And therefore, HDS found out that it was indeed Facebook which worked best for “with a small amount of money [they] could see the ROI for each channels and Facebook proved the more rewarding” je concluded.

Q5: what is the most obvious benefit for B2B?

There isn’t one answer to that question Sharon said, and she listed a number of benefits including

• cheaper marketing
• community of influencers
• re-engage participants
• better conversion results

The results for Hitachi Data Systems were tremendous and way above the initial goals. For whitepapers only, 9,000 of them were read said Sharon, a tremendous result when you think that most B2B companies will pay – not always wisely -  big money for doing this.

5 recommendations

Sharing issued her recommendations to B2B users:

1. test, go out there and find out what social engagement means to you;
2. segment your audience (target and non target audience). All you have to do is give them the option and let them choose what role they want to play ;
3. you don’t need a large budget but be sure to amplify the impact of your campaigns;
4. performance metrics are important (think Dashboard);
5. social interactions must be nurtured, have fun and play games.

Q&A

is there an internal program at Hitachi Data Systems ?
There is an internal social media ambassador network. HDS wants to show its people they are encouraged to retweet, share the information and be twitter/Facebook champions. and they can also win an iPad. Sister Hitachi companies provide the freebies.

Japan
It’s not easy because they don’t have the same culture in Japan (it’s “closed versus open kimono” she said). They don’t want to respond to any tweets. A big struggle took place but they were able to show them the purpose and they eventually were retweeted but “you had to show them first that you respected their culture” Sharon concluded.

metrics
Hitachi Data Systems have a major social media dashboard which they publish twice a year and they use it to show stakeholders what major benefits and issues are at hand and how many clicks are generated for instance (like 9,000 on whitepapers and how much you’d have to pay for such clicks)

Yahoo! movies summer program: from 200,000 to 1.2 million likes

On Tuesday March 27th, I attended my fifth Blogwell session (overall, this was the nineteenth session!) since the end of 2008, time flies! This session was taking place in San Francisco in the beautiful Golden Gate Club venue in the Presidio park, a stone’s throw from the Golden Gate bridge. Not only was the view beautiful, the lessons learnt from Yahoo! in their presentation were invaluable. Yahoo! was represented by Robin Zucker, Social Media director for the famous portal company. Her presentation was geared towards their engagement strategy and entitled “ summer movie programs”.

[photo cc by Yann Gourvennec http://bit.ly/picasayann]  

The Yahoo!’s objectives were to become more social, and increase the Yahoo! movies fan base as well as reinforce the fact that Yahoo! movies is the premier online movie destination. Generally, the focus for Yahoo! was Facebook, “for obvious reasons” Robin said, because of the amount of people involved on the popular social network.

“We are a digital company, so decided to help users decide what to see but also help them go and see the movies”. This is what prompted a partnership with a cinema house company named Regal Cinemas.

Yahoo!’s initial question for setting up the program (note: I love that term so much better than the word “campaign”) was user-centred: “What can we do that what would be relevant and interesting enough for users to share?”… which is a very good question to start from.

there is such a thing as free popcorn!

There is no such thing as a free lunch, but Yahoo! took care of the popcorn for all cinema goers in the States who were clicking their summer movie program banners! News fans, were indeed granted ‘”$6 worth for a small bag of pop-corn when they went to the cinema” through a coupon, Robin explained.

But the “key piece was the offline exposure in theatres” she added. Yahoo! decided to partner with Regal Cinemas which is one the of the largest network of cinema houses with 90,000,000 visitors throughout the Summer period (a rich period for film launches,such as Harry Potter and the smurfs as examples for the Summer of 2011)

2 distinct means of entry were chosen for users to engage in the program

• In Cinema theatres, there were placements of banners about the popcorn offer;
• Online, Yahoo! launched the popcorn.yahoo.net microsite

A mobile microsite was also put together. The site was leading users to the dedicated Facebook fan page. A great part of the program was to enable people to use social check-in (Facebook had just improved the system and that was providing additional exposure for Yahoo!).

mobiles and smartphones still a big challenge

However, “asking users to use their smartphones is a big challenge” Robin added because it puts the onus on the user who is “being asked to do something different”. Similarly, the online experience was key as the main site was the main driver for visits. People would enter their phone number and the coupon would be sent over to their smartphone, then they could initiate social sharing, and then they’d get free popcorn … Well, as long as they had a smartphone! Robin concluded, that “mobile isn’t easy, because people are sometimes confused”.

1.2 million new Facebook likes!

Yahoo! went from 200,000  to 1.2 million likes and surpassed its initial objectives by 400,000 fans! “Those promotions initiated a lot of buzz for Yahoo!” Robin added:

• to start with, it generated 1.4 million more minutes spent on the Yahoo! movies website;
• besides, it also generated 200,000+ social check-ins at Regal cinemas
• and $1 m worth of free popcorn was munched by Yahoo! movie fans

What Worked well according to Robin:

• it was tied to an event, Yahoo! didn’t create anything, but decided to build on something that was already happening;
• the partnership with Regal Cinemas proved very successful;
• agency partnership allowed program optimisation in real time;
• flexibility after program launch;
• the offer was relevant and highly sharable.

What didn’t work so well according to Yahoo!

• there are some limitations with standard Facebook applications, which doesn’t allow cobranding or has no ability track deal exposure and is limited to smartphones, which tended to exclude certain users;
• the national chain coordination was a challenge (on site posting etc.);
• users without smartphones also were the “loudest” in social media;
• challenges with mobile coverage;
• training the staff locally

Q&A session

Was there much attrition after the program?
There was little attrition after the event because the event was very relevant. There is always a small level of attrition, but it’s minimised when the program is good and matches the public’s requirement.

Why hasn’t Yahoo! created its own social media platform?
There is a strategic partnership between the 2 companies, 80% of Yahoo! users are already on Facebook and besides, education is an issue so it would be more difficult for Yahoo! to launch their own platform.

ROI? How do you measure?
In general, it’s not easy because we don’t get all the numbers from Facebook but track the value of a Fan on visits and clicks and as Yahoo! is valued through content advertising, having more traffic allowed additional and new advertising opportunities.

Engine Yard’s Dillon: “a private cloud is an oxymoron”

As I was in San Francisco today, I managed to squeeze into a meeting with some of my former partners of the IT press tour organised by my friend Philippe Nicolas. Today we visited Engine Yard, a new player at the forefront of the implement of platforms as a service (PaaS, i.e. the infrastructure side of cloud computing) for start-ups and Fortune 500 companies. Engine Yard’s CEO, John Dillon (our photo), shared his thoughts with us on the future of cloud computing with a panel of international journalists.

“The most important change in IT since the invention of the PC!”

John Dillon started his visionary presentation with a very straightforward statement: “Cloud’s the most important change to the way we do computing since the invention of the PC” which address the points made by many of the detractors of cloud technology in the past few years. “All revolutions in IT start with listening to the user and what works is what starts small, in a trial and error sort of way, and then deciding what really works” he went on. “The cloud is scary is disruptive” he said but “it has the possibility to change the landscape for ever, and we are part of that change”

Describing himself lucky, Dillon said they had built a marketplace for the cloud and that they have two kinds of customers:

• on the one hand, 2.0 start-ups who are looking to be the next Facebook. Dillon went on saying Engine Yard has 2,500 customers in 58 countries although they barely leave San Francisco. They can help our clients with the technology, but not with their business models.
• Engine Yard’s other clients are Fortune 500 customers but it’s not about core IT, it’s about experimentation and innovation: and it’s working.

“We are very early with the cloud” John Dillon added, but “Corp IT are still trying to figure out what it means but most of the innovation is happening at the fringe, with systems that couldn’t be done 5-10 years ago” and “if it doesn’t work you can throw it away because it doesn’t cost much money” he commented. Most business executives who want to innovate turn to IT and that’s because of  the cloud. the impact will be profound and substantial. The pattern that the cloud is following is similar to past successful innovations I have witnessed in the past. “Big IT shops are nervous about the future” he said provocatively and with passion, “but the change will come and we’ll have to be smart and not tear up the current systems that work”. CIOs beware, “the tsunami is coming” he even added. Not surprising they are reluctant to jump on the bandwagon …

evolution or revolution

It is often asked whether cloud computing is an evolution or a revolution. Dillon’s answer is loud and clear: “If it’s evolution and it’s very fast, sometimes it means that things get broken. The consumerisation of the cloud is happening everywhere and some will see it as revolution, others as evolution. Some IT executives are very positive and embrace the change rather than fight it. A whole bunch of customers 1 mile from here are doing very crazy things [by that he meant Silicon Valley start-ups] but “most of the business done with cloud will eventually come from big businesses”.

IT departments are not liked

But there is one think anyone who has worked more than one week for a large company knows, and that’s the fact that “everybody hates the IT department” and Engine Yard’s CEO thinks that this is also the reason behind this (r)evolution: “users are fed up of asking for new things and IT departments answering either that you can’t have it or that you will have it next year” he added.

To him, a good IT department should say: “we should do something about it and use the new tools”. “A powerful IT department is one that is at the service of their users and shift more investment into innovation from 20% to 30% or even more” he concluded.

A statement no IT user would disagree with.

a private cloud is an oxymoron

But the other problem with cloud computing is the “old sheep in new clothes” syndrome, which we described lately in an interview with a Sugar CRM executive.

“If you a re building a private cloud, you are just shifting the budget from one department to another and it’s only a way for the IT department to survive”. he bluntly described.

However, Dillon is no IT department hater, he is merely trying to wake them up to innovation. “We are planning to become a very strong partner of IT departments in large enterprises” he said, “but they won’t buy anything now, it’s too soon; within 5 years from now, they will!”

The cloud is a paradigm shift

“When there’s a paradigm shift, legacy start denying it, then they try to highjack the idea (stating things like ‘the cloud is just like it used to look’) and eventually, changes will come”. “Some big IT vendors will make the transition, but the sales model familiar to big IT vendors in which you sell very expensive proprietary products, very complex and with add-on prices so high that the sales person can buy a new BMW will go!”

This is the same thing that Dillon experienced whilst he was working with Salesforce. “10 years ago he said, CIOs wouldn’t want to talk to us, now they all do!” Having said that, cloud computing will not solve integration issues, and this is where IT departments will have an important role to play.

[photos, cc, 2012 by Yann Gourvennec http://bit.ly/picasayann]

social media lessons from Lincuplive

today’s selection is…

A piece on Alastair Walker’s blog this morning. I met Alastair at Lincuplive at the end of February; The lincuplive social media conference was a real success, with hundreds of entrepreneurs and social media enthusiasts from all over the country and speakers from foreign lands such as myself. The pitches were great and the content superb, I felt energised by the sheer enthusiasm and positivity; whoever knows Celia Lacy, Tim Dowxning and Glenn Le Santo, the organisers, will  understand why. But it’s not just that, it’s the people in the rooms, the questions, the urge to know which small business and startup owner were showing which really made you feel part of something. Last but not least, there was this team of bloggers from Lincoln university, the pride of that once very rural town which is awakening to other lines of businesses and proving very dynamic. And there was this chap Alastair, a former sports journalist, and a very nice bloke, who was leading this team of young writers in such a professional manner ! At the end of my break out session I remember one of students coming to me; she was very excited because the piece she’d written had been the most retweeted: indeed, social media works, that was even the tagline for the event, and we proved it in Lincoln.

Alastair Walker with his team at lincuplive

Working with The Connected Generation | Social media and SEO from the North

Working with Lincoln University students at a social media conference called Linc Up Live, gave me an interesting insight into the future, and a remarkably bright, fast paced future at that.

The students in action at Linc Up Live, Feb 2012

Think about it for a moment; we browse online, from Amazon to Pinterest, our butterfly minds bookmarking products, gig tickets, experiences that shape our view of the world. Websites welcome us back by name; our virtual friends share our blogs, photos, music tracks or news links. Ours is a connected world.

The generation that are studying at Universities across Britain today are perhaps the first in history to have a digital footprint since childhood, a truly social strand to their DNA.

All twelve of the Lincoln Uni media team who arrived at the Doubletree Hilton for Linc Up Live had their smartphones at the ready, Twitter profiles set up and a good idea of what the event was about. Fact is, almost anything can be researched in seconds via Google. From laptop to X-Box – we’re all connected.

via Working with The Connected Generation | Social media and SEO from the North.

Sugar CRM: a European perspective

This is the third Sugar CRM executive to be interviewed by visionary marketing.com. My first interview took place two years ago with Larry Augustin, CEO and founder of the CRM company, who is also one of the people who coined the phrase: “open source”. After a brief Skype encounter with the company’s marketing executive Jan Sysmans last year, I now had the chance of spending some time with Tom Schuster, VP EMEA of Sugar CRM. Let’s see what’s happening in Europe with regard to the development of CRM usage in this exclusive interview with took place a few weeks ago.

Sugar CRM: less known than Salesforce but doing frightfully well

Larry had explained his plans 2 years ago and 2 years later, we can say that “he has delivered on his plan” Tom said. Sugar CRM has been through phenomenal growth and is becoming, according to him, the “fastest growing CRM company in the world”. So, what are the numbers? Sugar CRM grew by  52% in 2009-2010 and 67% 2010-2011 and the company has been cash positive since end of 2010. Whereas it is still less known than Salesforce, which was started in the 1990’s, Sugar CRM are broadly recognised. “It’ a fantastic company” Tom Schuster added, “ in 2012,  we are planning 100% growth in Europe!”  a foray into the high end market … with a little help from IBM

Sugar CRM is in its 7th year of operation. It is mostly active with mid market customers (i.e. with 100-150 users), but in the last 6 months the company generated more activity with higher end customers (those with 1000+ users). “This is a space we didn’t target at first, but in which we are definitely getting” stated Tom Schuster.

This hasn’t been quite left to chance though; for “Sugar CRM has a strong relationship with IBM and work very closely with them  in the field”. This is what is driving a lot of the growth. Tom has actually seen an acceleration of his business since Q4 2010. According to Tom, Sugar CRM is “now in 3rd position globally in terms of number of users, with Salesforce at the top of course. The open source company “can now boast well over 800,000 seats worldwide and this is still accelerating” added Schuster.

Close integration with IBM has also been worked out from a technical point of view (with regard to the Cognos and Lotus product lines). IBM helps Sugar CRM address both the mid market and  very high end customers.

Sugar CRM in the magic quadrant

“There are  between 200,000 and 350,000 users in Europe” Schuster added, “this is pretty big business”. And Forrester gave the company an accolade by placing it in the leader portion of its CRM magic quadrant, i.e. not just celebrating the company’s vision but also its execution capabilities.

the ride of open source

“Open source is now able  now able to compete with regular software publishers” Tom Schuster went on. This isn’t new if you include open source stars like EZpublish (of which I am a client), Drupal or Joomla for instance. Yet, Sugar CRM is the first in the application arena to make such a big breakthrough. “With Sugar CRM we are going beyond mere open source software” Tom developed. “the code is free and can be changed, but building a business on that concept of openness and community is mostly about state of mind and attitude” he rightfully added.

3 focuses : social, cloud and mobile

There are 3 areas for the development of Sugar CRM. Let’s review them now:

1. social: of course, our readers know about that, this is a very hot topic at the moment. The real issue is to know how to position the software in the future when social will become very big, that is to say probably very soon. “Lotus live, Web conferencing, messaging systems, linkedIn data, Twitter data are all interfaced and it’s a new way of working with  CRM software” Tom Schuster added. Hirleo (an Israeli company) and Portuguese Gulf are already using Facebook as the main gate to their CRM system. Younger workers want to work with new fangled applications and social media is their favoured starting place. “Most of the marketing data are in the social media space anyway” added Schuster so the challenge is on how one regains ownership of that data.
2. cloud: can be run anywhere. but it can also be transferred from one hosting service to another. For instance, “one can get started on Sugar CRM with an Amazon cloud infrastructure and then move it somewhere else and this doesn’t cost anything in terms of licence” Tom Schuster went on. This transfer capability is “transparent to them” Schuster added, “Sugar’s code is free and this is a lot more than a buzzword. It’s a movement and while many have old sheep in new clothes, this isn’t the case with Sugar” he added. “Cloud means you choose your service and don’t even know where it is coming from” Schuster detailed . Sugar CRM have their own hosted on demand service, fully replicated, and it also exists on Amazon, which means that when you buy their hosting service you may choose to get Sugar CRM directly while benefitting from all of Amazon’s  cloud features. “it’s really revolutionary” Schuster added, “you have more control on your data, and you can move them 100% without loss and additional cost.
3. mobile: “mobile usage has rocketed up” said Schuster, therefore confirming what I have witnessed over the years too. “as of 2010, only a very small fraction of B2B usage was made by mobile” he said. “2011 saw a huge rise in mobile usage of CRM, up to 15% of total usage” Schuster said, “but it’s growing fast now”. [note: Orange.com mobile usage also amounts to 15%, therefore confirming Tom’s numbers. As of 2010, mobile usage on Orange.com was limited to 10%]. Sugar now exists in 2 different versions: corporate and ultimate. The corporate version  now amounts to 50% of total revenue, and it includes a mobile module, which supports all kinds of operating systems. An application has also been developed for each mobile OS in order to improve user experience. “There is no other way” Schuster concluded. The mobile browser experience is not a pleasant experience”.

• for more information on Sugar CRM, please visit their Website
• Tom Schuster’s biography can be found at

immersion corporation makes retro gaming experience richer on tablets #mwc12

Reporting live from mobile world congress from Barcelona for Orange Live

Immersion is a San Jose based company which was set up 18 years ago in order to develop force feedback controllers for joystick and other gaming equipment manufacturers such as Sony, Logitech etc. Immersion is now moving into mobile gaming and is working with mobile and tablet device manufacturers in order to add force-feedback into mobile gaming.

Fancy playing Grand Theft Auto on your Android tablet with the same kind of user experience as you used to have on a console or personal computer? Well, this is possible and I even tried it and it works. Immersion, a Nasdaq listed company based in San Jose, Cal. has developed drivers which make it possible for old games like Sonic or GTA to be played on Android tablets with a richer experience. Thanks to the technology developed by immersion, one can get force feedback when slamming the doors of a car or bumping into cars or buildings (don’t try this in real life!). The device is no longer passive and therefore you can have the best of both worlds: the mobile world and the retro game world.

The company is more or less in “stealth mode” to put it in the words of the person I interviewed on the stand, hidden behind large manufacturers of Android tablets that wish to use retro gaming as a means to attract consumers to their Android-based tablets. “Android is open source” the immersion representative said “and therefore, one can gain a lot of control on the platform”.

a new haptic experience

This new haptic experience is made possible through the registration of 1,200 patents, the immersion representative declared. “The software is free” he added, as “we want developers to be able to use it and develop on it; they produce good content and that makes it possible for us to partner with manufacturers such as Samsung, LG, Toshiba, Fujistu to name a few”.

As Glenn Le Santo pointed out in his story on the Live Orange Blog, the mobile world congress is not just about large brands but also a myriad small companies which are part of this ecosystem and make it thrive.

mobile world congress pictures day 3 #MWC12

Yesterday was even more hectic than Monday at mobile world congress. We had a number of meetings up and down the Fira (the name of the venue in Barcelona) including a very lively press conference organised by Eugene Kaspersky. What I found most amazing though was a sculpture which I hadn’t quite noticed on the first day. It is a winged horse (Pegasus) which was set up outside the Huawei tent. When looking a bit closer I then realised it was all made of phones. A very clever piece of Art and let’s admit it, very beautiful too.

album link: MWC-day three

Kaspersky: “we will soon witness cybercrime explosion in the mobile world” #MWC #MWC12

This post was originally written for the Orange Live Blog, reporting live from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona

On Tuesday February 27th, I had the opportunity to attend a Press conference organised by Kaspersky security. Eugene Kaspersky himself was present for this big announcement in mobile security. The firm is already widely known for its PC protecting suite and today it made a few important announcements related to its release of parental control suites for mobile devices as well as an advanced protection suite for Android devices. In a flamboyant presentation by one of the Press’s preferred showmen of the software industry, the Russian expert and businessman highlighted the risks that mobile users are facing in the near future. Yet, there has also been criticisms in the industry for scare mongering on the part of security software editors …

Cybercrime will soon be too big to be ignored

15 years ago, Personal computer users didn’t have a clue about cybercrime. Viruses didn’t exist, or were in limited supply, and when they did exist they tended to be rather harmless. Similarly, as of today, many users are still wondering whether cybercrime is real or not when it comes to mobility. Nowadays, PC users aren’t questioning that “malicious software” (aka malware) exists nor that it is a real threat. We all know it’s there and that having a proper antivirus installed and regularly updated is a must-have.  Such was Eugene Kaspersky’s introduction, meaning to announce that cybercrime is just about to soar in the mobile industry.

”IT will split into 2 environments : Android for the home environment and Business with the Windows environment” Kaspersky announced, even though Windows and Nokia my prove him wrong soon as it happens; but we understand what he is hinting at: open environments like Android are easier to pry into and are the prime targets for cyber criminals. “No safe zone will subsist” he added.

Going back into the history of computing, viruses like Chernobyl in 1998 were  so fierce that they made infected machines unusable. The virus would go and reprogram the BIOS (the basic software below Windows which makes your machine work) and damage it beyond repair. This virus and others like Melissa or “I love you” changed people’s minds about cybercrime for ever Kaspersky rightfully remarked.

Cybercrime is moving into mobiles

The Russian expert’s theory is that mobility is going the same route as computers a few years ago because, in his mind, “there are fundamentally no differences between computers and mobile devices”.

“The number of computer threats has reached a plateau” he went on, so there are few or no new players in the PC cybercrime space or otherwise, they would  need to be extremely professional. The computer crime scene is therefore mature enough and there are also other non malware related scams which work well in that space (SPAM, phishing, pharming being the most frequent ones). “Online banking only started in 2001-2002 and this is the reason why crime soared too after those days”, now that mobile equipment is booming (in 2012 there will be more than 484 million smartphones worldwide) “we will witness mobile ‘malware’ explosion” Kaspersky warned while showing us a chart (see picture above) with some very worrying numbers.

“75% of malware is targeted at Android”

“Cybercrime in the mobile industry started as soon as 2005” he added, and Android is now becoming the dominant mobile malware platform. (sign of the times, Android went through 1199 modifications in Dec 2011 because of security threats). Eugene Kaspersky said that he was expecting this to happen and he is now “sure that the trend will follow that of computers in 2000 and beyond. “This is bad news for smartphone manufacturer who will need to add extra processing power to cater for security” he said and added facetiously “this isn’t my fault!”. As the above chart shows, things started to get very bad in 2010 and mostly in 2011. And it’s not just mobile devices and tablets he concluded but all connected devices such as TV screens namely.

HOW TO PROTECT YOUR DEVICE

But it wouldn’t be right to scare all mobile and tablet users without giving them good and straightforward advice with regard to the protection of their devices. And apart from the security suites sold by Kaspersky (and its competitors), common sense is a good method for keeping your mobile data out of harm’s way. Here are Kaspersky’s recommendations:

1. lock your mobile screen
2. use security software (of course, you would expect that coming from a security software editor)
3. back up your mobile data
4. use encryption whenever possible
5. beware of what you install and don’t click on dodgy websites
6. do not jailbreak your device as you would enhance the capability of malicious software to damage the core of your mobile device
7. do not connect to untrusted Wi-Fi points
8. do not skip updates of your OS when they are available
9. do not assume that your mobile device is safer than your PC

2012 predictions

Kaspersky and his teams fortunately do not predict that a mobile IT apocalypse will take place in 2012 but they are pretty certain that Android will be the main target for massive attacks and that 2012 will see the rise of the first massive worms for Android as well as ‘malware’ in official market applications.

“scareware for charlatans”?

A critique of software security companies’ approach to malware protection on mobile devices (not just Kaspersky’s) was fuelled last November by Chris DiBona, leader of open-source software at Google. Kaspersky’s Denis Maslennikov dismissed DiBona’s claims by saying that Google had launched their own anti virus solution soon after. A complete thread of the Kaspersky/Google story is available at this url. It’s a bit early to tell who is right and who is wrong however even though there may be a bit of truth on both sides. Time will tell.

About Kaspersky security

The Russian federation is known for its high concentration of online crime perpetrators but also for being the home of some of the world’s most revered security experts. Kaspersky, named after its founder and CEO Eugene Kaspersky, a math lover who used his skills to make surfing safer is one of the leaders in that space. You can find details about their offerings at Kaspersky.com