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.