Good morning, we are on Monday, the twenty first of January zero two thousand and eight. No this isn’t a typo, but rather a sign that we are taking into account the fact that humanity still has a few millenniums to go through. Well… hopefully! [One may have doubts when one considers the dreadful status of pollution in emerging behemoths like China (and this is just a beginning; despite courageous efforts by the likes of the ex Prime Minister Gordon Brown, there is little or no evidence that anything will be done to curb carbon emissions over there)]. Thus, focussing on the long term is what the ‘Long Now Foundation’ (a term coined by famous UK musician and innovator Brian Eno) is doing as a day job. The foundation is a think tank aimed at promoting long term thinking (by long term, the foundation member certainly don’t mean anything like 18 to 24 months). As a result their seven recommendations are that we should:
serve the long view (and the long viewer)
foster responsibility
reward patience
mind mythic depth
ally with competition
take no sides
leverage longevity
All which items should be heard by marketers as the foundation for increasing Corporate Responsibility in what they are doing. Needless to say that we still have a long way to go, but there are also encouraging signs that things are moving in the right direction. Yet, those of us who are endeavouring to take a lot of hindsight and put Nature above Fashion and not sacrifice Culture and the Environment on the altar of greed, may have a tough time now and again. It was my case when I read that issue (Vol. 171, No. 4 dated January 28, 2008) of Time magazine Europe; the ‘briefing‘ section on page of this issue triggered a few thoughts related to that subject. In this section weirdly entitled ENVIROTECH and even more weirdly substitled Green Machines, Time describes some of the highlights of the Detroit 2008 auto show:
Detroit’s annual Auto Show displays the best and brightest prototypes for eco-friendly cars Jan. 19-27. A look at some of the top innovators from the U.S. and abroad.
TOYOTA A-BAT Utilizes solar panels
SAAB 9-4X BIOPOWER Runs on biofuels
FISKER HYBRID First true electric plug-in car
JEEP RENEGADE Gets up to 110 m.p.g.
MERCEDES-BENZ VISION GLK Powered by a diesel engine
The Long Now Foundation describes its Clock and Library project in the following way:
“Such a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well engineered, would embody deep time for people. It should be charismatic to visit, interesting to think about, and famous enough to become iconic in the public discourse. Ideally, it would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment. Such icons reframe the way people think”.
The Myths of Innovation is a must-read for would-be innovators
(important notice: this post is the original and unabridged version of a post written for Bnet, to which I am a regular contributor)
“Poor is the substance, alas! and yet I’ve read all the books”: Stéphane Mallarmé’s warning would be perfectly valid for most of the literature devoted to innovation. There are books on that subject however, which are really worth reading such as the inevitable myths of innovation by Scott Berkun. Berkun is a full time writer and speaker and former programme manager at Microsoft, the man behind the success of Internet Explorer at a time when the web was dominated by Netscape. He also delivers lectures such as this amazing Carnegie Mellon presentation on the book I am describing here. His book is not based on dubious principles but spells out clearly the “don’ts” of innovation. It’s a lot more powerful than most books because of that, because it’s easier to learn from mistakes than mimic other people’s behaviour. Here are Scott Berkun’s 10 myths of innovation summed up in a few words, and I hope this will convince you to buy a copy of his book too:
myth number one: the myth of the epiphany An epiphany, in essence a sudden moment at which creation is supposed to happen, is epitomised by Archimedes‘s Eureka moment or Newton‘s apple. Yet, if many innovations are described as magical moments, the truth is often more complex: hard-work is required, the Eureka moment is often coming at the end of that process (not the beginning). Most Eureka legends aren’t real, they are myths aimed at giving a romantic view of innovation,
myth number two: we understand the history of innovation Well, so we think, but most of the time we don’t. Most of the stories we read about innovation aren’t real either. Google wasn’t a search engine to start with, nor was Flickr a photo sharing platform etc. in actual fact, most innovations are the results of errors, changes and corrections, but we like history to smooth things out and make them sound perfect and simple,
myth number three: there is a method for innovation How is innovation delivered? Despite our attraction to recipes, innovation is – in essence – a “charge into the unknown” and therefore, a method for innovation is a bit of an oxymoron,
myth number four: people love new ideas So we like to think but most of the time it’s not true. Changing one’s habits is always a challenge, and that is true of customers too (remember Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the chasm?”). There is no end to the list of rejections that innovators have to face. Change management is in an innovator’s best friend,
myth number five: the lone inventor We like stories in which a genius single-handedly changed the world: Edison invented the electric light; Ford invented the automobile; Apple invented the first graphical user interface etc. all wrong! And most of these stories are wrong. Often, innovations happen simultaneously too (in different countries at approximately the same time). Lastly, successful companies are often started by a group of people, not the obligatory lone inventor,
myth number six: good ideas are hard to find Ideas are everywhere, and not just found as a result of a brainstorm session (a tool which most of the time is badly used and implemented). Ideas come in more than many ways, mostly through trial and error. As far as I am concerned, because I am not a very imaginative person, I love to pick other people’s brains and make notes of all the ideas they have had but have never had the pluck to implement. It would be so nice if we could… is often my starting point. The real issue is not the idea(s) but how they could come to fruition and when,
myth number seven: your boss knows more about innovation than you Berkun argues that managers can make decisions that others can’t but this doesn’t mean that they always know what to do. Often, power and a high position in the hierarchy exert pressure on execs and they feel terribly alone. I have witnessed that the higher in the hierarchy two, the farther away you are from the field and it’s easy to lose sight of reality; theoretical views don’t make decision-making easy. Often, managers are therefore afraid of innovation. Berkun provides the antidote by describing the most common necessary traits of successful managers,
myth number eight: the best ideas win
There is a fairy tale view of innovation (in fairy tales good guys win and bad guys lose) hence the belief that it’s always the best innovation that wins. There are so many counterexamples such as the QWERTY keyboard (aimed at slowing down typists to avoid jamming), HTML and JavaScript (probably the most horrendous computer languages ever invented), the M-16 rifle etc. There are 7 factors according to Berkun which are leading to product success: culture, dominant design, inheritance and tradition, politics, economics, subjectivity and short-term orientation,
myth number nine: problems and solutions Great innovations – such as the palm pilot project, a pioneering digital notepad invented at the end of the 1990s – often come from the clear and simple spelling of a few problems that they are meant to solve. Believing that serendipity plays a major role is also wrong and yet another proof of the myth of the epiphany. Hard work and prototyping are of the essence,
myth number ten: innovation is always good Rudolf diesel is said to have committed suicide when he realised that his invention would only be bought by the military (and therefore serve the purpose of the war between Germany and France; he was German but had always lived in France). His innovation was being used to do harm and kill people and destroy Europe, not to do good and improve people’s lives. Other examples abound quoted by Berkun in his book — such as the DDT and personal computers and even cell phones, not to mention discrimination via the infamous digital divide.
Such are the lessons we can derive from Scott Berkun’s research on innovation. In one of his posts on the Harvard Business Review blog, Berkun declared that true innovators don’t use the word innovation at all. They talk about new products, new projects, change management or just doing things. Innovation isn’t a playground for intellectuals; it’s a game for doers and hard workers. I found the statements so true, and so close to how I felt (sometimes I’m being asked to pitch about innovation and I feel weird about that, because innovation is something one does but it’s yet difficult to describe) that I decided to know more and buy this book; probably one of my favourite business books.
On Nov 10th, 2009 I was in Atlanta presenting at Blogwell on behalf of Orange Business Services, presenting our social media strategy and explaining how, why and what we did online to increase our brand advocacy. Yesterday, the video recording of that presentation was posted by SMBC and – assuming your firewall isn’t going to block Vimeo – you are kindly invited to click the following image in order to view the recorded session.
And if your firewall does block Vimeo, or that you find the quality a bit flaky, you are now left with the possibility of contacting me via the comments section of this post and then I can tell you how video can be made available to all easily and qualitatively, which is what I explain in that recording.
here is the introduction to the video by the SMBC representatives:
In his BlogWell Atlanta case study presentation, “Succeeding in Social Media Initiatives,” Orange Business Services’ Head of Internet & Digital Media, Yann Gourvennec, explained how they’re finding success in social media as a business-to-business brand.
Yann’s case study covered how they’re finding passionate buyers online that advertising can’t reach, how they’re using video, and how they’ve used social media feedback to improve their products.
—
BlogWell is the only conference where social media executives from large companies come together to share their case studies, offer practical how-to advice, and answer your questions.
In this article we’ll describe the take aways from John Earnhardt’s
presentation at BlogWell (http://www.gaspedal.com/blogwell) about the development of Corporate WebTVs and Vlogging and I will also establish a comparison – in part two of this post – with our own experience on the launch of our own WebTV at http://orange-business.tv
Video usage on the way up
There has been a lot of talking about that for a long long time, and by dint of spreading the self-fulfilling prophecy we are now witnessing an incredible development of video usage on the Internet. I am not afraid
to say now that WebTVs and videos in general are an absolute must-have for website owners. And it’s not just about YouTube and other social media websites. Of course videos are used and disseminated through this kind of websites. But there are also private WebTVs being set up by enterprises and there are good reasons for this. Big logos are now using this new means of communications to send more direct messages, less top-down, easier to record and understand.
Cisco’s John Earnhardt who was speaking at the BlogWell (http://www.gaspedal.com/blogwell) conference at the end of October 2008 in San Jose, California (BlogWell was an event organised by GasPedal, Andy Sernovitz’s company, and took place at the conference centre of San Jose on October 28, 2008. Andy Sernovitz is also the author of Word-of-mouth Marketing: http://www.wordofmouthbook.com)
praised this new medium quite extensively and gave us insight as to how Cisco is making the most of its use. John is in charge of multimedia on behalf of the American equipment manufacturer.
I’ve already had the opportunity to touch on the important subject of the return on investment of Web conferencing in a previous post published in three separate instalments on this very blog. One of the questions that came to my mind following that post is related to the comparison between various conferencing modes. Telepresence may be on top of the media agenda at the moment, but I don’t think that this will make the need for different types of conferencing modes any less important. On the contrary, the advent of telepresence is breathing life into this entire industry. This is a typical example of a competitive advantage applied to an industry as a whole, as Michael Porter would have it.
Having established this fact, what is the difference between the various conferencing modes and what makes them complementary rather than mutually exclusive? I have attempted to represent a number conferencing alternatives in the following slideshow in order to highlight how complimentary all these solutions could be.
Sir Nicholas Stern is a great man. I don’t know how many of you can remember his name but I for one will never forget that he once wrote the eponymous report that triggered the whole hooha about environmental issues. It was at the beginning of October 2006. Sir Nicholas wrote this report about our endangered planet and what we were doing to it and suddenly, we not only became aware of facts that were supposed not to exist before, but we got all dragged down into this big environmental maelstrom. Strange as it may seem, the bleak and distressing announcement that “there is a 50% chance that average global temperatures could rise by five degrees Celsius” Came as a blessing to me. For the first time in history, one was able to pronounce the “E” word without running the risk of being taken for a ‘Commie’. Why was that? Was it because Sir Stern was Tony Blair’s envoy? Not really. It probably helped but in fact I’m not even sure about that judging by the lack of trust Tony Blair and his successor had to suffer recently.
More seriously, Sir Nicholas Stern used to be the chief economist of the World Bank. That certainly lifts any suspicion about intentions he may have.
One could deem that Sir Stern was a wolf in sheep’s clothing but also that he was more credible than the most competent of environmentalists. Here lies a true Marketing recipe in fact that when the message is worth conveying, it is more important to voice it through credible or influential people (so-called opinion leaders) than using the most competent of dedicated professionals. This job of convincing and changing public opinion is possibly the most important of all. Al Gore also understood that a wonky powerpoint presentation could land the message that hundreds of true experts before him had repetedly failed to convey.
A true Marketing lesson, delivered this time for the common benefit.
“extreme weather could reduce global gross domestic product (GDP) by up to 1%
a two to three degrees Celsius rise in temperatures could reduce global economic output by 3%
If temperatures rise by five degrees Celsius, up to 10% of global output could be lost. The poorest countries would lose more than 10% of their output
In the worst case scenario global consumption per head would fall 20%
To stabilise at manageable levels, emissions would need to stabilise in the next 20 years and fall between 1% and 3% after that. This would cost 1% of GDP”
A recent article on this subject by AFP, the French equivalent to Reuters:
This is part two of our article on web conferencing ROI based on the Frost & Sullivan and WebEx document dedicated to the return on investment for web conferencing services.
In part one of this article, we have established that the main benefits which can be derived from web conferencing are not forcibly those that seemed obvious at first sight. The prominence of the productivity factor is obvious.
However, one still has to build a business case around that and try and estimate how much productivity can be derived from the usage of this ICT tool, and what impact it can have on either sales, profits, or even other business factors such as the investment of this productive time into other activities which in turn can generate either more revenue and profits or even lead to a leaner organisation.
Setting up one’s company is a difficult task. Stephanie Stewart wrote this very honest and straightforward report of her new social media venture entitled WiseOz. I thought that this report would be very beneficial to all our readers who are thinking of creating a new business in that department and wish to know the do’s and don’ts of such an activity.
This story starts like any other. Girl reads book. Girl is deeply inspired by book. Girl and boy jump head first into to the super competitive social community space. Well, I’m that girl. Now, fast forward to 10 months from when I first picked up that book and my partner and I are 90 days into the launch of our first social community.
I have for you what I learned in the first 90 days of the social community space that I must be stupid enough to share. These lessons are not intended to represent the lessons of everyone in this space. They are certainly personal to my experience and, in some cases, may be entirely unique. Regardless, these are the lessons I have gained and the observations I have made 90 days into this journey. Where some may consider it stupid to divulge such lessons (and so early on), I am sharing this with anyone and everyone that has the desire to follow their dreams into the social community space or who is already deep in it.
1. Your theme song and mantra will dramatically change
Just like every other team of entrepreneurs, my partner and I had a theme song which represented our mantra. Leading up to the launch (which was exactly 13 days late due to a million other lessons that I could write a book about) and a few weeks post-launch, we rocked to Rage Against The Machine’s “Renegades of Funk” … No matter how hard you try, you can’t stop us now! Well, days go by and the struggle to find one’s audience takes its toll on the psyche. A homemade mantra, “Breakthrough before breakdown”, keeps us going these days.
2. The guy who wrote the book will just try to sell you something
The book I read (which shall remain nameless) preached all about the emerging social community space. It taught, it inspired, it encouraged, and it even invited the reader to contact the author (who happened to be an angel investor himself) with ideas. Well, we did just that and were quickly given an offer (one could easily refuse) which was more like a consulting agreement with ridiculous fees for this and that to bring our idea to investors. This lesson was indeed the most disheartening of all.
3. Operations is the most important thing you will never have time to always be doing
My partner and I happened to pick a high maintenance concept that requires a tedious amount of day to day operational activities to continuously build and manage custom games and contests. If we’re not around, the WISEOZ.com world will fail to revolve and members will get antsy. We found very early on that operations will always come well before strategy and growth. It’s an unfortunate but true reality for a self-funded venture, as we are.
4. MySpace is a viral wasteland of marketing opportunity
Albeit tedious and primitive, MySpace marketing is a strategy or ours and many others. We set up a MySpace (and Facebook and Twitter) page for WISEOZ.com at the suggestion of some of our well-informed members. Little did we know how that trolling through the millions of MySpace pages and groups to find new members is actually a marketing strategy and not such a bad one at that. You can spend hour upon hour weeding through MySpace users based on their interests, demographics, and whatever other personal information they reveal and it will cost you nothing but time. This is a tedious but addicting activity that happens to produce the occasional new member which eventually leads to more and more new members through word of mouth. Not a bad marketing strategy if you’ve got a zero dollar budget and a good stomach for bad web pages.
5. The devil is in the minutia, and by that we mean customer service
Aside from day to day operations, we have managed to distinguish ourselves for our customer service. It was likely born from new entrepreneur syndrome (similar to new mother syndrome in that you just can’t put your new baby down) but has evolved into a sort of customer-driven customer service. Over the past 90 days, we’ve gotten to know several of our members on a personal level, their dogs, their kids, their accomplishments, their struggles, and more. We listen well and respond even better. In fact, it’s not unheard of to see us in the chat room for most of the day responding real-time to member requests for this and that special feature. Keeping our existing members satisfied and engaged comes first and foremost. No matter how cool your gadgets or fancy your widgets, your social community is only as good as your least satisfied member. All in all, it’s one thing to know your demographic, it’s quite another to know your members.
6. When the going gets tough, friends and family are nowhere to be found
My partner and I don’t have a huge network of friends nor do we have large families, but we do have enough to potentially offer a vast amount of support. Unfortunately, that has not been the case in our case. We have members from Seattle to Australia that will talk the WISEOZ talk and walk the WISEOZ walk completely unsolicited but we don’t have a single family or friend that will take the time to join our community and show their support. This might be a more personal experience, and I might be struck by lightning when I walk out the front door this morning, but it is true nonetheless and may be true for others in a similar position. It’s an odd phenomenon that the people closest to you can sometimes be your worst supporters.
7. Signs do occur but you’ll never quite understand what they really mean
My partner and I were ecstatic when FairyGodMom, our first paying member arrived just 2 weeks into launch. She didn’t bring with her dancing mice or a pumpkin coach, but she arrived nonetheless. Then, just over 2 months into launch, lightning struck my home (where else do you put your data center when you’re self-funded) and took out our connection to the world. The site was down for about 20 hours, members were in a panic, and we were trying to read the signs. We are still trying to read the signs.
8. Not every click is created equal
Within the first few weeks of launch, we gave Google AdWords a freshman try. In some cases, we paid upwards of $10 for a single click. On a $10 daily budget, it’s disappointing when one click produces nothing more than a bruise to your bounce rate. Shortly after, we stopped Google AdWords and found that our bounce rate dropped from a whopping 60% down to a respectable 15%. With paid advertising out of the question, we’ve resorted to a heavy dependence on word of mouth and homegrown viral marketing techniques. It’s a slow climb but forward progress is being made every day.
9. This business of social communities is not so social at all
Call us naïve but right out the gate we went looking for a mentor. It seemed the right thing to do at the time. We learned about other sites our members frequented and pursued relationships with them. We saw synergies all around us (maybe those were stars in our eyes) and know the market is big enough and broad enough to allow for such synergies. Unfortunately, we quickly found that those with investors run the furthest and farthest, the fastest. We have yet to find a competitor that is self-confident enough to consider a mutually beneficial or mentoring relationship. This is the part of the social community space that isn’t quite so social at all. In the end, site statistics will tell you you’re small but it’s your competitors that will make you feel that much more tiny and insignificant.
My partner and I carry these lessons forward into our next 90 days in the social community space with heavy hearts, thicker skin, and blood shot eyes. For those that find themselves dealing with similar circumstances, we hope we’ve offered you some insights that may assist you on your venture or maybe in comparison you’re doing much better and my article made you finally realize that.
Stephanie Stewart is the co-founder of iThinkWorks LLC, a start-up that identifies and develops products and services focused in and around online social communities. WISEOZ.com is iThinkWorks’ first social community project. WISEOZ.com is a free contest-based and interest-oriented community where members win prizes, participate, socialize, and connect through play-as-you-please games (“WiseWits”), interest-based social networks (“Circles of Interest”), and establishment of an online identity (“My Ego”). You can e-mail her at stephs@ithinkworks.com.
First and foremost, define the purpose of your corporate blog even before you start writing the first line. What is the objective of this blog? Is it about awareness? Is it intended for you to share knowledge with the community? Is it there to show that your corporation and its experts are particularly good at something? If you are able to answer any of these questions, then you should also know what and how to write in it. Of course, it is possible to maintain a blog just to talk about the weather. But at the end of the day there are very few chances that this is going to benefit your corporation. Eventually, not only will this make your blog ineffective, you may also run the risk of losing your management support. It is particularly advised to target your blog as if it were a standard information vehicle, through a carefully chosen niche strategy.
It is also recommended to create a blog per activity, rather than one that mixes up different subjects. This will increase the community effect and make it a lot more efficient. Think about starting small rather than launch upfront as many blogs as you have domains that you’re dealing with. It is much more desirable to have two or three blogs which are successful rather than a hundred which are not. Besides, don’t forget that blogging could be time-consuming.
How much time should be devoted to that exercise? And by whom? This is probably the most crucial question. If the blog depends on an individual then it can also become a mind-boggling question. Very often, bloggers who do this for leisure, give up after a while or once they have moved to a more time-consuming job for instance and their free time vanishes or is considerably reduced. This is one of the reasons why a lot of blogs disappear after roughly a year of activity. When it comes to corporate blogging, things are theoretically easier because experts are plentiful and it is possible to pool expertise and form expert-teams so that experts aren’t all busy at the same time. One can therefore establish rosters for the blog to be maintained on a regular basis by different people. Even on the open Internet, this is one of the most effectual methods which I have found in order to keep the blog alive in the long run.
Ideally, expert teams for corporate blogging should comprise six to seven bloggers, or maybe more (although it is dubious that there are going to be more than six of seven people who update the blog on a regular basis). Should some of these experts move jobs or tire of entering posts on the blog, do not hesitate to bring in more experts and change the team. Ideally there should be somebody in your corporation in charge of facilitating the team and helping them. A facebook and bios of the experts on the ‘about’ page can also work wonders. It increases personalisation and establishes credibiity. Besides, it addresses the point that the blog isn’t a flog (i.e. Fake blog, a blog written by some advertising agency or fake professionals/experts).
If you want to attract more than 50 visitors per day, at least three to four hours of work will be required every week. Once again, if you’re getting yourselves organised in expert teams, the amount of time that each individual would spend every week on the blog is going to be limited, although it won’t have any impact on the quality and update of the information produced. A minimum of one article a week has to be delivered for the blog to merely exist, but do not expect much if you can’t produce at least three to five each week. Once again, if your team is made of six or seven high-grade experts, this should not be a real problem and should not be too time-consuming. All these people also need coordination, the corporate and marketing teams should cater for that.
Lastly, do not forget that blogging is not an end in itself, but just a means to an end. However, if it is well-managed, it can be tremendously successful with regard to the objective which you have set at the beginning of your approach (see above).
blog post classification
Let’s classify the type of content that you can find in a blog along four main categories:
firstly, the easiest type of posts, let’s begin with those articles which contain lists of links and resources. All you have to do is to add a link to another article, a tool or other reference material, video etc. and establish a link with your activity and add a comment. Please note that articles which do not contain a personalised comment are an absolute non-starter and should be excluded at all cost. Besides, even if it is brief, any comment should contain added value to make the post worthwhile. On average, you should reckon that this type of articles will take up 30 minutes of your time,
Secondly, it is possible to enter articles whereby your experts will comment on news or events and even possibly seminars. In the corporate world there are a lot of these business seminars going on. My advice for this is to publish comments and notes taken during the seminars and presentations. Very often this kind of posts is very successful and brings in a lot of added-value content. Besides, other participants to the seminar event will also be using your minutes and/or linking to theirs. This is also a very practical way of enabling those people who haven’t been able to attend the event to benefit from the content which was produced at that time,
The third type of article which you could post are those one could call reference articles, whereby you will give your expert advice and opinion. These are probably the most gratifying ones for an expert, those which would establish his/her expertise in the most transparent fashion, but they will also be more time-consuming, and despite the quality of their content they might not be the most successful ones. However, this paradox should not stop them from producing this kind of articles, on the contrary. Once again, do not attempt worldwide fame with niche expertise, it is much better to be well positioned on that niche which will make you and your corporation visible in your ecosystem,
Lastly, there is what I would entitle best practice articles. These are the ones in which experts are going to define and describe, for instance, the 10 Golden rules for doing this or the other, the five most common traps which you should avoid etc. They might not be the most profound of articles, but they will work wonders since online visitors are keen to find them on the Internet. This kind of article is also going to bring returning visitors, and track-backs (i.e. Other blogs linking to yours).
Last but not least, it must be added that a good corporate blog should comprise a mixture of these classes of posts. The blog in which you will have only lists of resources, or reference articles, or even Best practice articles could not be very successful in the long-term.
12 worst practices of e-mail usage in the workplace and recommended strategies for increased productivity (in 6 installments)by Yann Gourvennec
As announced in a previous post, here is my analysis of e-mail usage (or misuse rather) in the workplace. I have also inserted my recommendations for productivity enhancement for each of the worst practice items which I have described. This is obviously not meant to be a comprehensive list. Feel free to add comments to this post and add items.
Introduction: we have all become ‘anoraks’
In the Internet world e-mail can be considered one of the oldest web-related applications together with the late Gopher and newsnet. But e-mail per se already existed in pre-Internet era. As far as I am concerned, I have been a user and observer of e-mail usage since its inception in the late 1980′s when I was working for one of the leading IT providers of that time. That IT provider made the decision to extend the usage of e-mail (then in proprietary format) to the entirety of the company’s users (i.e. 125,000 users across 35 countries but sadly enough far fewer today). The main issue with electronic mail at the time was about the requirement to make all employees including managers actually use it, the latter being rather reluctant. Indeed, many of them had difficulties coming to terms with the fact that their status was no hindrance to using the tool by themselves (many couldn’t associate typing with manager status, at the time it used to be secretarial work only). We were number 3 in the IT world at the time, but it didn’t make any difference in fact, strangely enough. All this to show our younger readers how far we’ve travelled in terms of IT usage since such prehistoric times.
A little less than 10 years after, the Internet revolution was making IT a cornerstone of work efficiency not only in businesses, but also schools, not to name the entertainment revolution in the home. In business, it has now virtually become impossible to name any profession not resorting to IT for their normal day to day operations. Luddites are now few and far between. To an extent, we have all become nerds. So much so that IT has now become just one more of our working tools, just like pen and paper, the mobile phone and other tools, just an ordinary tool, and no longer a subject for nerds/anoraks to discuss amongst themselves using incomprehensible three letter acronyms.
However, despite the fact that IT has become ubiquitous, and even in spite of the Internet in particular, can we venture to say that we are all using it properly? In fact, there are many signs showing us that we are not. E-mail usage (be it in the business world or even on the open Internet) is very often inadequate, and can even be the source of conflicts in more in many ways.
Besides, e-mail usage has to face up to new and increasingly worrying problems: exponential rise of spamming, e-mail overflow, e-mail addiction through devices like blackberry and other mobile Internet devices, not to name viruses. What I’m proposing here is an analysis of e-mail usage, its good and bad practices, and the strategies that are required in order to protect oneself from the side-effects of bad e-mail usage, and also more positively, positive strategies for better using this tool.
At first sight, the question might seem ludicrous. But in actual fact it’s not. In 1999 I wrote an article for a French online magazine related to e-mail usage in the professional sphere in which I was drawing my own conclusions after 10 years of e-mail usage both in and out of the enterprise (11 years within and 5 years without to be precise). Even then I could sense that something was going amiss with e-mail usage. I was pointing out that we had gone a long way since the introduction of Corporate e-mail systems in the mid nineteen eighties. At that time, the issue was about getting managers to answer their e-mail directly. This battle was mostly won a decade later but I was also pointing out that there was a downside to this piece of good news and that a number of bad habits had developed throughout the years which required close examination. I then proceded to describe all these examples of email abuse.
So, what is the status now that another 10 years almost have gone by? Have users become any better at using this medium? Or any worse? Has mobile e-mail made things better or caused even more aggravation? In the open Internet world, things are clear. Either you receive an email that is sollicited or it’s a spam. Boring, longish and inapropriate email requests which would be better answered by phone aren’t a real issue. Internet users just ignore them and that’s that. But in the business world, the rules of the game are radically different. For a start, most people feel under pressure when it comes to answering emails like this. These are most of the time messages aimed at covering oneself (sometimes dubbed with the not so tasteful acronym CYA, which I will not translate but feel free to click the link if you so wish). You just can’t ignore them. Something’s got to be done about them, no matter what. But the real question is: how can you avoid spilling even more oil on the fire when you do?
I have a feeling that the answer to the two above questions if I had to provide them point blank wouldn’t be positive. Real-time dictatorship is everywhere. We have to act fast, we have to do more, we have to prove more efficient, so that email overflow is supposedly a sign that our work is efficient. Well, not really in fact. Probably just the other way round. I know that there are quite a few twitterites (http://www.twitter.com is a community ‘microblogging’ platform heavily used by Web 2.0 players to exchange rapidly with their ‘followers’) around me who’d even like the damn thing killed. I’m not suggesting that. If they have a point when saying that it’s nicer to get to a social website and interact with whoever you choose to, email suppression is not an option. We need email, but surely we also need it a little differently. Consultancy firm Deloitte is one of these companies advocating ‘no e-mail Fridays’ in order to prevent employees offloading large lists tasks onto their colleagues a few minutes before the week-end. This kind of radical measure is proving two things: one that this is a sign – Deloitte aren’t alone – that this issue with email is more universal than just me getting annoyed. Secondly, that if a performing consulting group can function without e-mail at least once a week, others could too. This is as true a feasibility study as you can get. Other means of interaction exist and they aren’t too exotic.
As a result, I will soon revisit and update this article of mine on e-mail usage. Stay tuned to the visionary marketing blog for marketing & innovation. For those of you who cannot wait to read the English version, please refer to my original text in French on my main website at this url: http://visionarymarketing.com/articles/fusage-1.html (in 4 installments).
While every day seems to bring a whole bunch of predictions and thoughts for this new year (and the decade to come!), I have selected this excellent article from The McKinsey Quarterly entitled “Eight business technology trends to watch“. In a Nutshell, this article provides an extremely interesting overview of emerging technology-enabled trends that will shape businesses and the economy in coming years.
These trends fall within three broad categories, namely managing relationships, managing capital & assets and leveraging information in new ways, and include …
As I explained in a previous post on his blog, my gifts for the New Year is now available for download at www.visionarymarketing.com. Here is the introductory text again for those who have missed the previous entry.
“If you have always wanted to know everything about innovation but were too afraid to ask, rest assured because Visionary Marketing will bring this information to you in a few days.
Our good friend Brice Auckenthaler (founder and general manager of Experts-Consulting, a leading edge Innovation Consultancy group based in Paris, France) has been kind enough to let us publish the first few sheets from his brand new book to come: Imagination 3.0. Although the official release of Imagination 3.0 will take place in late January, you will be able to read and download the first few pages of this new unmissable opus in a few days from now.
Brice is undoubtedly our best expert in innovation and his and his team’s ability cover the entire spectrum of innovation, from creativity to making the rubber meet the road. Their references encompass major players as Nestlé and Thalys, Maserati, Mc Donald’s, Ferrari, Kraft, Coca Cola, Société Générale and others. Their footprint is International (Europe, USA, Asia, South America, China, Australia etc.) and their teams multi-cultural. Their capabilities extend from benchmarking, interviews and research, scenario planning [brand architecture and brand stretching], to brand & innovation committees on the new brand assets, new initiatives for product launches.”
Granted, the character on the left-hand side may not be representative of the average European teen age group, but I needed to attract your attention. Still, unconventional behaviour is what awaits the average corporation wanting to launch a 2.0 website. When I write unconventional, maybe I should correct this and replace it with behaviour adapted to different conventions. Jennifer Jactel of the Toulouse graduate school of management is digging her teeth into this issue with a very good report on generational marketing aimed at teenagers.
“Creating a blog has become really easy and its use has been standardized, even in the business world. But managing a corporate blog is still challenging because one has to deal with comments and posts which might get out of hand very quickly; keeping tabs on one’s brand image and reacting quickly to issues is also a serious problem. Of course it is time consuming, but it is also worthwhile.
Indeed, more than saving on communication costs, it enables businesses to get direct feedbacks from consumers and interact with them too, to control the information they want to release, but above all to improve their image through an appropriate Web presence. Because teenagers are Internet freaks, B2C marketing strategies will have more impact if the organization is present online, particularly through a blog. However, teenagers are also advertising-averse, therefore enticing enterprises to be more and more creative and innovative in their marketing campaigns or products; all this means that they also have to gain their trust, mainly through the establishment of direct contact.
Businesses targeting teenagers should really think about incorporating direct web communication within their marketing strategies. However challenging this may be, it can lead to real success in the blogosphere and beyond. Indeed, a teenager who likes something will tell his friends and so on and so forth, thereby starting a word of mouth promotion of your approach”
A short while ago I went to visit one of my customers in order to have a discussion about innovation. One of the ideas that was mentioned during this meeting was about the need to have a repository in which ideas could be stored and in which one could also exchange and debate about them. Immediately, the idea of a wiki sprang to my mind. It’s only natural because this is what I’m using in the office; at Orange business services we have a Confluence(*) wiki platform, set up on top of an Oracle files database (a popular CMS platform used for building repositories) and the wiki enables us to store as many documents as we wish and start discussions with our colleagues and actually to organise ourselves around projects. This is very convenient and I thought it was worth mentioning in a discussion with my client.
And indeed the client in question was interested. However, this client also mentioned to me the name of a project by IBM that I have never heard of before: Thinkplace. At first I thought it was some sort of piece of software that you would put on the Intranet and then use to share material with your colleagues. But then I realised, by searching the Web with the ‘thinkplace’ keyword, that thinkplace was actually a fully fledged open Internet website whereby anybody, repeat anybody, can post ideas in order to be debated with others. I don’t know if that’s web 2.0 for you, but I think that’s a great idea. So I entered my idea. The only way to test the system, is to do it hands-on, and actually if it is about proposing new ideas and getting people to start discussions, I thought it would be a great opportunity to submit an idea I had thought of and get the opinion of others. So here’s my idea, in writing and in a short video which I recorded for the purpose and posted on Facebook too.
The idea is to enable collective and fully connected shared open spaces, between different companies, on the outskirts of the cities of our big metropolises to avoid unnecessary commuting, + provide outstanding infrastructure & tools for knowledge workers
Reduce the impact of commuting on the environment, improve work efficiency, develop open innovation, improve well-being of employees
How would it work? How might it be implemented?
Several high-tech companies could partner together to provide such shared spaces, in partnership with professional real-estate companies. Shared spaces could then be rented out to companies (large or medium) who would rent a number of cubicles for their employees: salespeople, knowledge workers, clerks etc
What are the benefits to the stakeholders of this idea?
The idea is to enable collective and fully connected shared open spaces, between different companies. On the outskirts of the cities of our big metropolises so as to avoid unnecessary commuting, as well as provide a work dedicated area for knowledge workers, and also entice knowledge sharing across different organisations. The project is not technologycal per se, but technology is of the essence when it comes to making people collaborate. These shared office spaces could also be the opportunity for high technology companies (IT infrastructure, application software, telecommunications etc) to demonstrate new technologies in the collaboration area, and even develop new tools, more pervasive, more user-friendly. The impact on the environment as well as the well-being of employees would be dramatic.
Despite the availability of cheap and almost unlimited bandwidth, pervasive and outstanding collaboration tools, which enable people to share documents and even design new ones over the Internet without leaving their offices, I have noticed that working habits by and large haven’t changed much in the past 15 years. Despite all the talk about remote working, mobility, pervasive computing etc, most of the knowledge workers from our big cities around the globe are still doing the same stupid thing everyday: spend hours commuting from their leafy suburbs to the centre of town, or even the other way round. However, should we ask these people sitting at their desk why they have to be in the office, I think we would be very surprised to discover that, for a vast majority of them, the people they work with most of the time are not sitting next to them in the cubicle next door, but faraway. And even when they are located in a nearby building, chances are they will talk to eachother over the phone.
The benefit would be manyfold. High-tech companies would not only make revenue on this, but that would also provide them some sort of showcase for their new technologies, and they would also be able to benefit from this initiative to show that their ideas can have a positive impact on the environment. This would be a compelling living proof that technology can actually do something about the environment. Participating companies would also benefit from this idea because they will have to invest less in real estate, they would have more flexible workforces, and it has also been proven by IBM in a similar experiment in Paris, France (1995 and beyond) that on average employees were gaining 1 1/2 hours every day on travel time and that one of our out of this one hour and a half was reinvested in work and productivity (employees been keen to show that they don’t benefit from the system but are more productive.
(*) Confluence is one of the platforms made available to enterprises in order to set up internal wikis
Yesterday, I got an e-mail by Stan Relihan, an extremely well connected user of linkedIn. In a recent podcast, he explains how he uses linkedIn to generate business relationships. His description of his usage of linked in is different from what we hear ordinarily, that is to say that you have to invite only people that you know beforehand. Stan is more in favour of an open network approach, and I think he is entirely right. In this podcast, he proves his point by showing that thanks to LinkedIn he has been able to connect to Vint Cerf himself. Thanks to my connection to Stan and others, I realised last night that I was only 2 degrees away from Vint too. Amazing!
This podcast triggered a few other thoughts, namely with regard to technology usage in the US and elsewhere and a potential halo effect. It was interesting to hear Stan say that Australians were lagging behind in terms of technology usage (certainly not in synch with their image on this side of the globe). As a matter of fact, this is something that I have heard in almost any country that I have visited, maybe if we except tiny Lithuania, where weather conditions are so adverse that technology now has almost acquired sacred-cow status. In fact, at the end of the day in an ever more globalised world where we think that everything is similar, that we all think the same, that we all behave the same, reality shows that it is not the case at all. In that ever more globalised world, individual country behaviours are still very different. And I have chosen a few examples in a mobile and telecommunications industry to prove my point. Here they are:
Depending on the technology difference in patterns is proven by numbers. Here are a few examples/questions:
Who are the biggest users of mobile telephony? Italy (in 2007, equipment rate at 150% or the US at 84%)
Who are the biggest world users of 3G? Korea, Japan or US? (Idate 2007 report again but page 28)
Now, of course, the US is so big, that in terms of sheer market value they beat any other country hands down (they ususally account for 50-60% of the world’s market potential but these numbers are decreasing what with the BRIC countries and other emerging markets experiencing double digit growth) .
Tat is really the global paradox in my eyes. We are increasingly similar and uniform and still… behaviour patterns – despite globalisation – are still very very different from one end of the world to the other. At the end of the day, this world is a lot more diverse than people think and I think that this is what is making international business so exciting.
What about you? are you sad that there are differences or on the contrary, do you think that this is a great asset? hit this comment button and share your ideas with us now.
This is both a proof that 2.0 applications are actually reshaping the world of IT and also an example of how light client technology such as Ajax has developed beyond the buzz. Business week reports today that Capgemini will start recommending Google software to its corporate clients as part of an alliance programme to be announced on September 10:
“The partnership to be announced Monday represents the first time one of the world’s top technology consulting services has embraced Google’s software bundle, which includes e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets and calendar management.”
You might believe that I’m getting obsessed with The Halo Effect, Phil Rosenzweig’s latest book (see previous article on the Ideo shopping-cart and the halo effect on his blog). To an extent I am ready to admit to it, but once again, I think this is an important book, one that everyone should read, because some of the things that are said in this book are really fundamental.
The Internet, once dubbed the land of the swift, and the now famous (or infamous depending on the point of view) web 2.0, can lead certain people to think that things are changing so fast, nothing is as it was before. I think this is the case for another halo effect. It is true that the Internet is making things happen at light speed. It is not true that the Internet supersedes normal business rules (we saw that during the bubble period a few years back), and it is not true either that absolutely dazzling new ideas come cropping up all the time.
More than often, older ideas are being recycled, and this is not a criticism. This is one of the paradoxes of innovation (from Latin innovare i.e. to make something new). It would be wrong to think that we can invent new things all the time. Besides, there are many examples where really good ideas can be recycled productively and effectively. As we have seen in previous articles, second life is the result of some sort of recycling of what Vivendi did – only clumsily – in the year 2000 and yesterday I was browsing the latest web 2.0 applications on facebook, and I came across a new website publicising the fact that they were launching a new ‘human’ search engine, a service with which actual people carry out Internet research or your behalf. Well, that’s a new idea isn’t it? Sorry guys, it’s not. Webhelp came up with something similar at the end of the 1990s, although a few years later they turned themselves into a normal contact centre operation company. Similarly, I wrote an article about Internet research way back 1999, which I updated slightly in 2003 (information tracking in the information age revisited, by Yann Gourvennec, 2003). Chances are you think that because Google is ubiquitous (their Mobile version is really astonishing too) and everybody uses it and it’s so easy to use and God knows it is easy to use, you do not need to know how to research things on the Internet. But I think that this article which I wrote 10 years ago is still mostly valid. Okay, some of the links there are obsolete now. But the way that we should organise an Internet search, the way that you select, graft and prune new Internet keywords in your search engine research entry box , should more or less remain the same, if you want to carry out a profitable Internet research campaign. It strikes me that because the Internet has become so pervasive, that everybody uses it and thinks they are so wise (in fact they’re not. Google’s engineers are!), it is really amazing to see how few people know how to actually research information properly. Finally the human search engine idea which was launched by Webhelp some 10 years ago and now is being recycled is a very apt and timely idea.
Indeed, novelty is something very relative, at the end of the day, what really matters is efficiency and it makes perfect sense that ideas, novel ideas which are not mature at the time of invention find a second life (no pun intended) a few years later. It is entirely natural, and entirely desirable.
So that’s the innovation paradox: that way of making new things out of old ideas. Real success, most of the time, does not always arise from absolutely dazzling new ideas, but from those that are really and effectively being implemented.
(almost) anybody interested in innovation knows about the IDEO process and the well-famed Ideo shopping cart video shot for ABC. It is indeed a staple for innovation seminars and a renowned example of faultless creativity methodology. In the ABC video (you can purchase it from ABC see link per below) you will see the IDEO team challenged about the re-design of a simple everyday object, the shopping cart. And the demonstration is compelling. Here’s an object we use on an everyday basis, that is almost universally used from one end of the planet to the other, and we hadn’t even thought about making it more user-friendly. Obvious isn’t it? And the Ideo team therefore redesign the aforementioned trolley in less than 2 days. Impressive, all the seminar attendees stand up and cheer, here’s an impressive process that leads to compelling results (see the finished trolley on the lefthand-side)!
At least that’s what I had thought too, maybe a bit naively, until I read the following critical articles for which I am providing links hereafter. Afterthoughts include questions such as “why wasn’t this shopping cart deployed after the show and why can’t we find it in shops?” and also “is the exercise real or is it artificial, namely at the beginning of the process when they start investigating the problem with cameras, are they doing it for real?”.
I was also pondering – whereas I have just started reading Rosenzweig’s latest opus – whether this wasn’t a case for a halo effect, i.e. “a tendency to make inferences about specific traits on the basis of a general impression” (The Halo Effect, p50). Yes, the video looks nice, and the people look brilliant and the process really seems to work fine. In just two days a new (supposedly) superior shopping cart was created but the real question is: what is really good design? Is it design that looks nice, or is it also about practicality for instance? (what about all these boxes on the cart, are they really so convenient? where do you store them? how do you pile the trolleys on one another etc.). Is it design (only) aimed at the end user or is it also aimed at shop-owners too? that’s an important part. In the video the onus is on the team to develop a shopping-cart that would be more convenient. But more convenient to whom? Can we assume that shop-owners aren’t worried about the cost of their trolleys, the way that they are stored, their lifespan? Besides, is the trolley issue the main issue, even for end-users? For instance, would clients rather pay more for food stored conveniently in a designer trolley or pay less for food piled up in a chicken-wire box on wheels?
These are open questions, but chances are that the answer lies in the fact that one cannot find these trolleys in our shops.
But mind you, don’t jump to the conclusion that the Ideo process doesn’t work either. Judging on just one example would simply be not enough. It would just be another halo effect.
Good morning, we are on Monday, the twenty first of January zero two thousand and eight. No this isn’t a typo, but rather a sign that we are taking into account the fact that humanity still has a few millenniums to go through. Well… hopefully! [One may have doubts when one considers the dreadful status of pollution in emerging behemoths like China (and this is just a beginning; despite courageous efforts by the likes of the ex Prime Minister Gordon Brown, there is little or no evidence that anything will be done to curb carbon emissions over there)]. Thus, focussing on the long term is what the ‘Long Now Foundation’ (a term coined by famous UK musician and innovator Brian Eno) is doing as a day job. The foundation is a think tank aimed at promoting long term thinking (by long term, the foundation member certainly don’t mean anything like 18 to 24 months). As a result their seven recommendations are that we should:
All which items should be heard by marketers as the foundation for increasing Corporate Responsibility in what they are doing. Needless to say that we still have a long way to go, but there are also encouraging signs that things are moving in the right direction. Yet, those of us who are endeavouring to take a lot of hindsight and put Nature above Fashion and not sacrifice Culture and the Environment on the altar of greed, may have a tough time now and again. It was my case when I read that issue (Vol. 171, No. 4 dated January 28, 2008) of Time magazine Europe; the ‘briefing‘ section on page of this issue triggered a few thoughts related to that subject. In this section weirdly entitled ENVIROTECH and even more weirdly substitled Green Machines, Time describes some of the highlights of the Detroit 2008 auto show:
