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

Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales : “from Wikipedia to Wikia” – #istrategy (6 of 6)

On October 26, I attended the iStrategy conference in Amsterdam. Here is part 2 of the account of Jimmy Wales’s presentation on Wikipedia and Wikia.

To gather all the parts of this post together, just type: http://bit.ly/walesvm2!

what the future holds

The future trends for the foundation, according to its founder are twofold:

1. on the one hand, it’s about expanding Wikipedia’s language capability and namely the most popular languages of India (in India there are over 20 different languages!”). In order to do that, keyboard issues will have to be overcome;  “this will be a challenge!” Jimmy Wales added,
2. on the other hand, the future is also about a new project name Wikia. “If Wikipedia was the beginning, i.e. an encyclopaedia, wiki is much more ambitious platform; it is meant to be a library!” declared Jimmy ‘Jimbo’ Wales.

Jimmy Wales gave us a few example of new projects developed from the platform, in order to give us a flavour of what the future holds:

The Guttenplag wiki (http://de.guttenplag.wikia.com) for instance, is a full-fledged critical report of the Ph.D. dissertation of Karl Theodor Freiherr (Earl) zu Guttenberg in which the authors of the collaborative project demonstrated that 371 pages of that dissertation (i.e. over 60% of the whole document) were actually copied from other sources. This led to the resignation of this gentleman as defence minister of the Federal Republic of Germany (for details refer to “Karl Theodor zu Gutenberg: “baron without a title” BBC.co.uk 18th of February 2011). Hundreds of people, not just journalists, took part in this project, Jimmy pointed out. In essence, one could comment that what this Wikia platform is bringing the power of wikis to the people.

Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales: the Wikimedia foundation #istrategy (5 of 6)

On October 26, I attended the iStrategy conference in Amsterdam. Here is part 2 of the account of Jimmy Wales’s presentation on Wikipedia and Wikia.

to gather all the parts of this post together, just type: http://bit.ly/walesvm2!

the Wikimedia foundation

… is the mother company behind the online encyclopaedia. Its primary source of funding is its yearly donation campaigns. “Last year’s campaign was most successful“, Jimmy Wells emphasised. $19 million were donated online, out of the $28 million which make up the annual budget of the non-profit. Running servers and paying for the bandwidth supporting those millions of pages costs a mint of money, and $28 million is a handsome budget. The aim of the foundation is to be “independent, neutral and avoid the whitewashing of anything for anybody” Jimmy added.

Yet, how you ensure neutrality and fairness in the community in which not everyone is capable of editing the content (see part 4 in this series) is a much debatable issue.

Having said that, the foundation has 80 full-time employees working for it, and above 100,000 volunteers. “Do not expect our employee pays to grow to the 4,000 level within 10 years” Jimmy Wales said, this is not supposed to happen!

Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales: “our contributors are computer geeks” #istrategy (4 of 6)

On October 26, I attended the iStrategy conference in Amsterdam. Here is part 2 of the account of Jimmy Wales’s presentation on Wikipedia and Wikia.

to gather all the parts of this post together, just type: http://bit.ly/walesvm2!

user profile

The new generation doesn’t know what a regular encyclopaedia is Jimmy Wales went on: he gave us evidence of that when he shared a tweet with us in which a teacher (see above picture) was asking a student what and encyclopaedia was and the student responded: “is it some sort of Wikipedia?“. One may well surmise that Wikipedia has become the epitome of an encyclopaedia … for better or for worse.

Yet, don’t imagine that your average Wikipedia contributor is representative of the overall population: “87% of our contributors are made male ” Jimmy pointed out. ”This is because the software is very geeky” he added.

The technical complexity of the code is “putting off other people who aren’t computer nerds” he added. But the Wikipedia team is working on a new improved WYSIWYG interface (thank God! I’m not exactly computer illiterate but editing Wikipedia for me is a real chore).

For the same reasons, contributors tend to be very young, the average age being 26. And the number of Ph.D. among them is double the average numbers of what they are among the overall population!

Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales: all nationalities are culturally different – #istrategy (3 of 6)

On October 26, I attended the iStrategy conference in Amsterdam. Here is part 2 of the account of Jimmy Wales’s presentation on Wikipedia and Wikia.

to gather all the parts of this post together, just type: http://bit.ly/walesvm2!

Pop Culture in Japan

Talking about usage, not all the world is using the popular online Cyclopaedia in the same way. Jimmy provided a very striking comparison (see above picture). The Japanese for instance, are very focused on pop culture which is according to Jimmy Wells, “a very important part of Japanese life”. I personally couldn’t imagine it could be any worse than in Britain and France but it is apparently…

Our German neighbours seem to be very much into geography Jimmy went on “a joke which could only be made in Holland” according to him, hinting at the darkest hours of Europe. The Spanish and French are the only nationalities in which they are not articles about sex he added; maybe a sign that “they are the only ones who are actually having it” he ventured, and they are far more interested in culture and the arts than the average too.

a world of differences

“it is difficult to draw any conclusions from this” he commented more seriously, but it defeats the idea that we have all become similar. On the contrary, it ‘”shows the great cultural differences between nationalities”. It is easy to explain and he gave us an example: “any Briton would be interested in reading facts about Nick Clegg” he said. Other nationalities wouldn’t even know what party he is from and why he is deputy Prime Minister.

Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales: 20 million articles in 270 languages –#istrategy (2 of 6)

On October 26, I attended the IStrategy conference in Amsterdam. Here is part 2 of the account of Jimmy Wales’s presentation on Wikipedia and Wikia.

to gather all the parts of this post together, just type: http://bit.ly/walesvm2!

[photo by YAG: Chinese restaurants using the Wikipedia brand to name weird dishes ]

20 million articles in 270 different languages

with 420 million visits per month, Wikipedia is a behemoth even though “English growth is slowing down” according to its co-founder. Yet, other languages are soaring, namely those of emerging countries. Kazakhstan for instance is a fast-growing contender, but nothing like Chinese (Wikipedia has now been allowed there even though pages like that on Tienanmen Square are still filtered according to ‘Jimbo’).

Censorship issues and usage in China

“Wikipedia doesn’t want any involvement with censorship” Jimmy Wales declared. Even though he has contacts with Chinese officials, he said he didn’t want to hear the complaints about the content being supposedly inadequate. “I’m still waiting to hear the complaints” he added. Yet, whether this is due to censorship or not, and despite the growth he described early on, and regardless of the Chinese habit to recycle the Wikipedia brand name in weird and hypothetical dishes (see photo above), “usage is still lagging behind” in the  Middle Kingdom.

Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales: What Wikipedia is really about – #istrategy (1 of 6)

On October 26, I attended the IStrategy conference which took place in Amsterdam. I was there to deliver a keynote on social media are ROI/ROE, but I must confess I also attended the conference in order to listen to Jimmy Wales who gave us an overview of his celebrated online encyclopaedia: Wikipedia. I was there in the front row, with my notebook in my lap. Here is the account of Jimmy Wales’s most impressive presentation, a good means of taking a bit of hindsight and LAN learning to know better a collaborative website which everyone uses but few have in-depth knowledge about.

 

to gather all the parts of this post together, just type: http://bit.ly/walesvm2!

[photo by YAG: Jimmy Wales on stage at iStrategy in Amsterdam on October 26]

who is using Wikipedia?

Was Jimmy Wales introductory question to the audience and not surprisingly, everyone raised their hands. “who has edited Wikipedia?” Was question number two and a couple of dozen delegates raised their hands this time, which shows that the audience was really upmarket. It also demonstrates a known fact, i.e. that only a fraction of users are content producers, and that most of them are content with the ability to look at others users’ entries.

no free beer

Wikipedia is “based on the concept of free software” Jimmy Wales went on. But free, in that instance, doesn’t mean that it’s free in “the free beer sense of the term” he added. What it really means, he explained, is that “everything that goes into Wikipedia can be reused and redistributed, repurposed for all kinds of things, namely the translation into a number of languages”.

what Wikipedia is … and isn’t about

Wikipedia is meant to be “the sum of all human knowledge”. A somewhat bombastic boast I would say, for there are instances in which, the online encyclopaedia is delivering false information; this should not be forgotten, even though – like me – one really dotes on the project, the crosschecking of information is a necessary and unavoidable process.

Regardless, what Jimmy Wales was hinting at was that the purpose of the online collaborative project is to collect information on Hamlet for instance, not to be a repository of everything regarding Hamlet, let alone to “keep a copy of Hamlet” he said. It’s about describing and debating Hamlet… and other subjects.

in comes Wikia

At the end of his introduction, Jimmy announced that the Wikimedia foundation (i.e. the non-profit organisation he is heading) has launched a new project which caters for those wanting to debate Hamlet, and other subject, on and on and on. This new project is called Wikia. But before we delve into this new venture, I remember that Jimmy Wales gave us an overview of Wikipedia and how it’s being used worldwide; this will be the subject of a few other posts on this blog… Stay tuned!

Duval Suggests Killing More ideas Fosters More Innovation

note: this article was originally compiled and written for the Orange Business Services Live blog

Bluenove’s Martin Duval is not only a successful entrepreneur and an open-minded innovator. He is also a controversial business writer with French flair who can deliver straight to the point conclusions. Whereas most would-be innovators will lay a stress on the production of new ideas – the ideation process – Duval knows, like most hardened innovators, that the truth lays not in that process but in the more delicate art of rejection and … killing innovations. Here are his thoughts on the subject, for the benefit of our readers:

Lately, I had a chance to describe the challenges faced by French start-ups with regard to the financing of the early innovation phase and the managing of partnerships with major corporations, and that piece was published by the French High Tech weekly 01 Informatique. In that article, entitled all players in the innovation chain should play their role!, I was stating that start-ups should only focus and partner with those corporations, which have implemented a structured and proactive business incubation and partnership programme such as NOVA External Venturing, part of the manufacturing industry behemoth Saint-Gobain, or the ‘Veolia Innovation Accelerator’. Amongst the new ‘Open Innovation’ processes which have been designed and implemented by those major corporations, I did point out the ability and the value of killing innovation and potential partnerships. I know that this may sound strange coming from a proponent of innovation but I insist, one has to learn how to say NO if one wants to get to YES.

What I mean by that is that start-ups by nature have limited resources and time to work their way through the complexity of a large organisations and handle their long-winded decision-making cycles. Therefore, when a large organisation is able to implement a process to efficiently filter out potential partners within a reasonable period of time, it is in fact sending out a positive rather than negative message. I would advise a 1 month or a 6 weeks-delay at the most as a fair period for a large organisation to get back to a candidate partner with a positive or negative answer. Delaying the response for any length of time and keeping start-up owners on tenterhooks is simply not on in my eyes. The start-up in question can then decide to keep trying to partner through another part of the organisation at its own risk, or to change what needs to be changed within its project structure or even look for another partner.

Ideally, the more a negative feedback is explained and detailed, the higher the value that is delivered: such explanations can help highlight the weaknesses within the original project, so as to better identify the target market position for the new solution. As a consequence, it is an easy way for corporations to deliver value and improve their reputation within their innovation ecosystem. It is certain though that rejecting an application actually requires a lot of preparation as well as some process and resources in order to produce the analysis and manage the follow-up the within 1 month to 1 ½ month.

As a matter of fact, rejection can take place at each gate within the open innovation stage-gate process with a higher probably and more preparation needed early in the process than ever after: from screening before initial contact, right after the initial contact and/or meeting, after the feasibility study, during the partnership negotiation and after the test. To a certain extent, I even believe that a good quality rejection process delivers more attraction and better corporate image than piecemeal success stories. Besides, that kind of process applies not only to start-ups but also to universities, government-owned or private R&D labs, suppliers and customers involved in crowd-sourcing initiatives etc.

At the end of the day, large organisations can derive a real high-end competitive edge from the management of rejections regarding innovation proposals from start-ups and other innovators. The tougher the process is, the more desirable those selective large organisations therefore become in the eyes of smaller players.

Similarly, when it comes to managing internal innovation processes, too little attention and effort is devoted to killing projects in my eyes. Oftentimes, a standard innovation pipeline is contrived – as part of an innovation process – with a wide ideation spout on the left side and a narrow tube on the right, from which successful projects emerge. Once again, there is so much value in killing projects efficiently at each stage-gate of the innovation process and here are a few examples of the expected benefits:

• re-allocating resources to other, more promising projects,
• learning from trial and errors and capitalising on best practices across projects,
• developing a culture of innovation – learning from errors, aiming at success – in order to foster motivation and encourage new daring ideas,
• simplifying project portfolio management,
• reducing overlap if not competition between projects.

Innovation processes are becoming more and more collaborative with the help of enterprise 2.0 platforms supporting ideas and project management. Thus it ensues that sharing thoughts about innovations that should not be accepted and projects that should be stopped is an absolute must-have. Once again, let us emphasise the fact that the proper number of resources should be allocated to the screening of projects and that pruning weak ideas should be an area of focus.

Both the rejection and even the killing of bad ideas/innovations can actually deliver benefits from a competitive edge viewpoint. Are you – and your company – ready to reap those benefits and image improvement from saying NO and for killing more innovations?

Bluenove is a consulting firm specialized in Open & Collaborative Innovation http://www.bluenove.com

media-aces: evangelising about Corporate social media in Europe

http://media-aces.org blog now open

Media-aces.org is the blog which will underpin our new club of European social media enterprise experts. This isn’t just another blog about web 2.0, but the platform which we will use in order to evangelise about social media and how important it is in the business world.

• read on at http://media-aces.org

why big business needs social media … under certain conditions

 

Kogart House in Andrassy Ut in Budapest - Digital Marketing Forum 2009

 

On May 5, 2009 I was invited to deliver a presentation at the Digital Marketing Forum in Budapest, Hungary. The seminar was chaired and facilitated by fellow LinkedIn networker, Marketing expert and professional presenter Davig Hughes (apparently an amateur surfboarder too). 

The presentation is also made available online at Slideshare.net:

 

8 Tools For Online Reputation Management (ORM)

Managing one’s online reputation has become a must. It is absolutely unthinkable for anyone who wants to make a professional appointment to leave a photograph on one’s facebook profile in which he or she is holding a glass of champagne and assuming weird poses (and God knows I came across quite a few counter examples). Many chances are that the person with whom you are about to have an appointment has just gone straight to ‘Google’ your name on the Internet. This is what is called online reputation (or online identity) management (abbreviated ORM), that is to say your image as it is showing online through Internet and social media exposure.

In this article I will list 8 kinds of tools which could help you work on your own online reputation, or check upon other people’s online presence.

• ORM tools #1: metasearch engines (i.e. an aggregator of all search engines) for social media such as http://samepoint.com , will help you check whether you are popular online or not. Samepoint will combine results from various sources such as social networking sites (facebook, mybloglog, linkedin, typepad, wordpress.com, blogger etc.), wikis, bookmarking sites such as delicious and others. I used my own example and I found out my samepoint request could produce up to 1000 results. This is not very surprising in fact, because this is the effect of my online work for the past 15 years. Internet presence takes time to develop, even though impressive results can be obtained very rapidly if you are committed to working on it. What is interesting too is that samepoint shows whether your documents contain ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ keywords. Very few ‘negative keywords’ were found in my case and this is not coming as a surprise either, as it has also been my choice from day one not to communicate online on anything negative or overly critical. Another example of a metasearch social media engine is http://socialmention.com which also deduces a social ranking from the results although it is difficult to relate that ranking to the quality of your work. Social media pundit Guy Kawasaki has reached a ranking of 89/100, and he certainly raises the bar very high given his frantic online activity (Guy has 77,916 followers on twitter as of today),
• ORM tools #2: blog search engines such as technorati or http://blogsearch.google.com make up the second kind of tools which you can use to manage your online reputation. Obviously, the more your write on blogs, including other people’s blogs of course, not just your own, the better your chances to increase your online reputation. Eventually, you will establish the credibility through your writing. For instance, many a CV-related issue in job-seeking can be circumvented in that way (here’s the result of my research on ‘marketing & innovation’ which shows that my blog comes in pole position, just above my Belgian friends from future lab). Thus, writing in blogs can actually position you on top of search engine results without having to pay for anything (this is commonly described as SEO i.e. Search Engine Optimisation), but it also means that you are producing content on a regular basis, not just from time to time,
• ORM tools #3: news search engines such as Google News which are not only scouring the Net for information from newspapers and press releases but blogs too – as long as they have been deemed reliable sources by the Google people. For your blog to be taken into account by Google you would have to go through the manual process of getting your blog registered. Finding the right place for you to submit your URL can be a bit tricky, so here’s the link which will make you save time. Please note that not all blogs are allowed to join the Google News list of reliable sources and that it is a manual process. Within hours of my main blog being accepted by Google News I received a phone call from the people monitoring employee blogs in my company to congratulate me for being registered,
• ORM tools #4:some other search engines look for comments you may have entered on social media sites. http://www.backtype.com for instance, shows a relative low number of comments in my case. This can be explained by the fact that I’m rarely using my own name in comments, even on my own websites and blogs (I prefer to use my brand name so as to enhance the reputation of my website on search engines),
• ORM tools #5: forum search engines. They are a good example is available at bigboards or Google Groups. In my case, little or nothing is showing through search engines for I very rarely go to forums (if I do wish to enter a personal comment on any of them however, I usually don’t enter my name in full for the particular reason that I don’t want it to show. Comments in B2C forums can sometimes be pretty direct and they don’t always provide real value with regard to your online reputation. As to expert forums and technical forums however, they can be very instrumental in publicising your expertise). One thing is worthy of note: comments in forums are online for a very long time, hence the reason why you should be very careful about them. Here’s an anecdote about that: I once entered a comment about Internet set-top boxes on a consumer forum in 1996, which I later regretted, and it took me at least 5 years to make it disappear. In fact in never really disappeared, I merely added more comments on top of that one. Actually, Google Groups will still show comments I made way back 1996, and my former e-mail address – no longer in use fortunately – is also showing through Google. As a conclusion, traces are left everywhere on the Internet, one should be very careful about that,
• ORM tools #6: the next category is micro-blogging search engines such as http://search.twitter.com which scans the most popular micro-blogging engine www.twitter.com. that’s how you can recap on someone’s tweets or even trace those who forwarded or commented on your tweets or blog posts,
• ORM tools #7: this category consists of social network aggregators such as Yahoo’s outstanding Mybloglog social website which enables you to link your blog to others and make friends with other bloggers and promote your articles,
• ORM tools #8: this is the final category of online reputation tools which I’d like to present here, and it is that of people-centric search engines. I would namely recommend http://www.123people.com. One of the biggest issues with social media is that you are entering profile information in all sorts of different places and cannot point people to a single page which merges all this data from various sources and delivers an executive summary. This kind of search engines just does that for you. It will mix all the sources of information from the Internet – including multimedia files – which are related to you and merge them into a mash-up. You can have a look at my own 123people example here. Sometimes results are a bit weird because they show photos of other people which have nothing to do with you. One may actually prefer another tool such as zoominfo which can show more accurate results. In zoominfo, once you have signed up, you will be also able to claim ownership of your profile (through the “reclaim profile” option), which will give you an opportunity to gain control over it. My zoominfo profile can be seen by clicking here.

As a result, you now have evidence that you are leaving traces about yourself all over the Internet. To a large extent, in the past 4 or 5 years (mostly since 2004), social media has even exponentially increased that issue. Now you also have the means – with this very simple toolbox – not just to evaluate your current online reputation but to actually do something about it, as well as communicate positive information about yourself and actually shape your online image.

Down to business now, and remember that there is no erase and rewind button on the Internet!

Futurelab’s Thys: in innovation “the wrong questions turn out to be the right questions”

Alain Thys: a relentless innovator and profit-tracker

On March 4th, 2009, I was able to meet and have breakfast with, at last and after a few missed opportunities,  Alain Thys in Paris. Alain is one of the partners of futurelab, a consultancy based in Belgium (of which he originates) together with fellow Stefan kolle. I can’t actually remember when,or how we came across each other, but it is bound to be on the web, and that’s probably how we ended up cooperating on the Futurelab blog by the way.

 

What I know though is that Alain is the author of one of the most important Marketing presentations that I have seen at slideshare.net, which I keep using over and over again, and is entitled marketing accountability (you will find the direct access to the presentation at the end of this article). Alain Thys’s biography is also very interesting.

He describes himself as a “shopkeeper”. He has had extensive experience in European advertising and marketing at companies like Mexx and Reebok. He was in charge of marketing at Reebok Belgium for a while, when it was decided to merge it into the Dutch arm of the company, at the beginning of the 1990s, and that’s when the Internet arrived. It is also when Alain discovered these “funny computers” and the things that we could do with them. A 3-year stint in the Netherlands at the head of the Reebok  marketing unit ended up in a re-org and a sabbatical in Mexico (lucky him!).

At the beginning of the year 2000, he then decided to go into start-up mode and work for a joint-venture in which AOL, and LVMH (Louis Vuitton) were involved. Their new plan was a groundbreaking online idea for the travel industry. This was “way ahead of what was done in those days with regard to online travel”. In fact, it was a bit like à la carte holiday packages, what is commonly described nowadays as dynamic packaging (although very little of it is still to be seen in the field, which means that it’s still ahead of its time).

The usual cash burning story about 2000 bubble start-ups is unfortunately repeated in this venture of Alain’s: a $130 cost per customer was leading unfortunately to a meagre revenue of $16, hardly enough to generate profit. Vision doesn’t always lead to profitability, but there is one thing about visionary people, is that they shall never be deterred. And that’s exactly why Alain decided to move on to the next idea. So he started a new incubator for e-payment in Ireland, related to mobile payment. He admitted to having a lot of fun creating the new start-up, and he did this for a couple of years before joining a media group in Belgium in 2004-5.

This media group, itself a media pioneer in Belgium, led Alain Thys to focus on “creating new things and generating new profits”. He admitted to “not being very knowledgeable about the Internet world” which actually led him to ask “the wrong questions, which turned out to be the right questions”.

Alain was lucky enough to actually see the Internet at its inception, he grew with it (not exactly generation Y though). And he learned as he was going along. As matter of fact, and to be honest with him and yourself, everybody’s learning as we are going along in this market (a case of the blind leading the blind I guess).

He then created futurelab in 2005, and Stefan joined him in this transition period. Futurelab is a consultancy geared towards “generating new profits out of marketing and innovation”. This consultancy is actually working very much based on word-of-mouth, and is expanding across Europe, doing little or no cold-calling or direct marketing. But it is taking WOM to the next level with the help of the Internet.

Their work is mostly based around marketing strategy consulting, and their aim is to “generate profit through innovation and customer centricity”. Future lab’s objective is actually to “deliver on that promise of a value to the customer”. He described innovation as being “doing something differently, and that you haven’t done before.” But he also has profitability in mind.

Alain Thys declares that “in 80% of current projects, we see marketing & innovation fail in that respect”. When asked about the reasons why such an obvious metric is actually not taken into account, which seems zanyish and at the same time is happening on a daily basis, he answers thus:

1. it is either that people forget about the bottom line altogether. However, there must be some sort of payback on innovation,
2. the second reason why innovation fails is that most innovators “forget about what it means to the customer.”

So, Alain adds, very often, “what is needed is a different perspective, and this is when consultants become really useful”.

Most of Futurelab’s business is done through word-of-mouth using their Internet website and blog, an incredibly comprehensive digest of the most authoritative Internet and blog writers about innovation, which can be found online. The blog is available at http://blog.futurelab.net and shouldn’t be missed. I would also recommend Alain’s set of slides which are available and downloadable in creative Commons format from sideshare.net.

Social Media: Beyond the ROI issue

the Blog Council logo

Below is the contribution which I sent to the council on behalf of Orange Business Services.

With the advent of the Internet since the middle of the 1990s, users have become used to not only getting what they want online, but also to being able to participate and interact with each other. 15 years later, the widespread use of the Internet as a source of information and also a place where users can help each other and solve each other’s problems has changed the face of commerce, of organizations, and even relationships within the hierarchy. In view of these changes which have permeated every section of the outside world, enterprise communications must get to grips with the benefit from the great potential which is made available by the use of social media. The power of the Internet to connect people and get them to interact can not only be used internally, but also outwardly and ultimately with one’s customers to begin conversations in a brand new way. The expected results can extend way beyond the mere ROI issue. This is what we have experienced at Orange Business Services with our 2008 Security Blog initiative.

The Blog Council | Here are a few trustworthy corporate blogs

Blog Council members working hard under Andy Sernovitz's supervision

Corporate blogging isn’t easy… And Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff published an interesting report about why people don’t trust most company blogs. In fact, looking closer at Josh’s comments, it’s not corportae blogs but corporate speak that clients don’t trust.

But this is no news to us. We’ve been going on about that for donkeys’ years. So now is the time that corporations react differently and start real conversations with their ecosystems (in b2b, it’s not just about clients, an average 21 persons are taking part in any one b2b decision in large 1000+ employee companies according to a Marketing Sherpa study).

So, what are the corporate blogs which can be trusted? Here’s the Blog Council’s take on the phenomenon, and guess what?! The Orange Business Live blog is one of them. Cheers to our writers!

The Blog Council | Here are a few trustworthy corporate blogs

Posted using ShareThis

 

Here are some other examples of trustworthy blogs, too (and yes, they are all Blog Council members):

• AccuQuote
• Analog Devices
• Cisco Systems
• Coca-Cola
• Dell
• General Electric
• General Motors
• Graco (Newell Rubbermaid)
• Intel
• Lenovo
• Mayo Clinic
• Molson
• Nokia
• Orange Business Services
• Petro-Canada
• Pitney Bowes
• Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
• Rubbermaid
• SAP
• Sharpie (Newell Rubbermaid)
• Walmart
• Wells Fargo

Andy Sernovitz on Disclosure: “Disclosure is Easy”

Web 2.0

The next presentation at BlogWell after Ken Kaplan’s Intel presentation and John Earnhardt’s description of what Cisco was doing on the video side, was Andy Sernovitz’s presentation about disclosure best practices. Disclosure is utmost important in social media usage within firms. This ethical issue has to be thought through very carefully by social media managers, and not just by lawyers. “Disclosure is essential”, Andy said, it is “the only way to be successful”.

But he also insisted that “disclosure is easy”. It is about “saying you are and who you work for”. In essence, it means that you have to say “I work for such and such and this is my personal opinion”. This applies to you blogging on behalf of your company and can also apply to you managing bloggers doing the same thing on your behalf, be they internal or external. As a matter of fact, it is also fairly applicable to you when blogging for yourself on your personal blog in case you have a full time job somewhere else. It’s a matter of honesty and transparency, which is very much in synch with the early versions of what used to be called netiquette.

read on at

http://www.blogs.orange-business.com/live/2008/12/sernovitz-on-so.html

ROI study sheds light on conference benefits (2)

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.

> read on at this address on the Business Value & ICT blog

business value and ICT blog now open!

A brand new Orange Business Live blog dedicated to business value and ICT has just been made available to the worldwide community of readers and possibly contributors. A registration form will soon be made available in order to enable users to engage in passionate discussions online on the subject of the impact of ICT on business.

the business value & ICT blog

This blog is about creating business value from ICT and provides a focal point for passionate discussions about how information and communications technology can bring actual value to your business. The blog is structured around seven topics (see bottom of the page) ranging from application performance to unifying communications. Subjects such as the impact of ICT on business, ROI calculations for communications services, and golden rules for new ICT transformation projects will be tackled. Our pool of authors will grow over time and new members are welcome to join as writers for the Orange Business Live blog.

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ROI study sheds light on web conferencing business business benefits (1)

it’s not just GREEN IT …

It’s not just with Green IT that ROI calculations are a must. Conferencing is very much at the centre of most discussions on that topic at the moment. I believe that Cisco’s much touted launch of its new telepresence system a couple of years ago has been very instrumental in putting conferencing – and video conferencing in particular – on top of the business agenda. The recent interest in environmental issues  (as in our new CO2 saving tool)  – no longer disconnected from business – has also triggered an outstanding revival in the conferencing market. Similarly, the accelerating pace of globalisation and the fact that business teams are now increasingly scattered across different regions is no longer a subject for the likes of Charles Handy (who warned us more than 13 years ago that virtual organisations were our future) but a reality that almost all knowledge employees have to live with and a potential opportunity that the most nimble of us can leverage. No doubt then that the demand for conferencing tools is rising.

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Wizeoz’s Stephanie Stewart reflects on social community launch

wiseOZ community / Social media  site

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.

by Stephanie Stewart, Co-Founder of iThinkWorks LLC and WISEOZ.com

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.

golden rules for corporate blogging: preliminary questions (2/3)

preliminary questions

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.