Open a Portal – Close the Sale: Why Manufacturers Create Sales Portals

In today’s world of social media, successful sales and marketing in manufacturing is a complex balancing act requiring more and more visibility to actual data. Real-time visibility to dealers, agents, and customers involved in your business has never been more important for maintaining successful pipelines and customer loyalty.

If you don’t have a bi-directional communication portal to every channel of your business, you’re missing the critical information you need to stay ahead of your competition. You may not have a sales portal to your business, but your competition does and they are listening. They are listening to your prospects, your reps, and your customers.

The good news is many manufacturers who have become lean on the production floor are learning that applying similar principles in sales and marketing can also lead to increased production. These manufacturers know nothing is more important to their sales than an accurate visual of what is happening in their channel right now.

These forward-thinking manufacturers are looking at their complex sales scenarios, including inside sales, field sales, direct sales, reseller networks and partner sales and noticing communication gaps, redundant data and slow movement. They understand two things very clearly. First, they recognize the impracticality of trying to make good decisions using countless spreadsheets on multiple desktops with no consolidation. Next, they understand that their sales models include people who are not their employees but rely on them for business performance and that giving these non-employees a method to communicate allows their companies to monitor and adjust their performance. Then they ask, “How can we view the whole sales process in real time to better run our business?” And the answer is a sales portal which helps improve management and forecasting in these areas:

• Account ownership
• Distributor management
• Order management
• Support management
• Pipeline visibility
• Quoting
• Closing
• Messaging

A sales portal can also bridge the gap to your back-end systems and create a seamless communication protocol that empowers everyone in the channel, employees and non-employees, while providing accurate real-time visibility in a secure manner that can help accelerate the sales process.

View the Edgewater Channel Portal in action.

What can you monitor with a sales portal?

• Real-time dashboards
• Heat maps across the entire territory showing high and low performers
• Inside, field and channel sales
• Security between users accessing quotes and orders
• 30/60/90 day forecasts
• New revenue
• Estimated close dates
• Quote requests
• Service requests
• Customer loyalty
• Announcements for tradeshows and product guidelines

With a portal you empower your sales force with the tools needed to succeed. Each user has a different security level and sees a custom dashboard. For example, a manufacturer’s rep can see how his or her overall pipeline is performing. The rep can see new leads, can adjust those leads and can notify you of constraints. As the manufacturer you can see the rep’s pipeline incorporated into yours, and you can help move sales along by knowing precisely where the rep is in the pipeline. You can also send discounts to your field reps immediately and see how those discounts perform real time.

With a sales portal you can allow all of your reps to have access to a common document library and collaborate via discussion groups where you  can include future products, sales literature, competitive information and more.

To see what is happening right now means opening a sales portal, which is as easy as opening a dock door in the warehouse – once you build it. For help building your seamless sales portal, contact Edgewater Fullscope for a product demonstration.

CRM Resolutions for 2013

Organizing your personal preferences in CRM is a great way to start your day, review your upcoming events, and utilize the features of Microsoft Dynamics CRM® 2011. Below are a few easy ways to stay organized in 2013!

1. Setting up your personal preferences:

In your CRM options menu, update the below fields on the “General” tab.

• What page in CRM do you use most often? What page would you like to set as your home page/landing page? If you review your dashboards frequently or like the visual reminder of your activities, you can set it as your default pane and default tab. (A)
• Do you use the “Get Started” pane? If not, disable it. It will add more real estate to your CRM form. (B)
• Set your records per page. By default, CRM list 50 records per page. We recommend changing it to 250. (C)
• Check that your time zone and current are correctly set. (D)

2. Stay Organized with Dashboards

One of the best ways to put everything you need in one spot in CRM is on a personal dashboard that you can set on your home screen and see all your major needs. As described in this blog, you can set a home screen that CRM will start on every time you open it and you can set a default page for every entity. But what if you want to see more than one CRM aspect right away?

Setting up a personal dashboard will allow you to choose up to 6 different views on one screen. Not only will you be able to put in the views such as your daily activities for the day, you can also put charts within the dashboard to measure any kind of progress to suit your needs!

Here are just a few of the countless examples of dashboards:

• This dashboard put personal “Activitiy” views all in one dashboard so you don’t have to toggle between different views

• This dashboard captures a few measurement charts as well as an opportunity and activity view

3. The “What’s New” Feature

“What’s New” is an exciting new feature of Dynamics CRM 2011 which allows users to follow their fellow colleagues, certain accounts, etc. for up-to-the-minute activity. It is similar to an internal social media page. Below is an example of the items users can follow.

The “Activity Feeds” comes in a solution which is free to download, just make sure you have rollup five installed for it to function.

As you can see, there are plenty of ways to keep organized in CRM. All it takes if a few clicks and turns and you can determine what works best for you!

To learn more about the Edgewater CRM practice, click here.

Know Your Customer: How Web Analytics can save your IT applications team money

We’ve all dealt with requirements that were written by well-meaning, but technology-confused procurement departments, or business users who believe that people still use the Mosaic Browser (my first graphical browser!). Few authors of quasi-technical requirements put much thought to the actual cost of implementing a modern, rich, dynamic web application on decade-old technology.

A purposely over-the-top hypothetical quote :

The application must support Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0+, Netscape 4+ at a minimum graphical resolution of 800×600 pixels.

While you may at first chuckle at this obvious bit of anachronism, think back to the last system requirements you spec’ed out for a web application.

What browsers did you ask to support? Were you shocked when the development team told you you couldn’t have that cool AJAX drop-down because your browsers didn’t support it? Were you suprised when compromises had to be made to the look and feel, or flow of the application? How many users really use those old browsers, anyway? How many of your users do?

“They shoot browsers, don’t they?” — Jeremy Keith

Don’t know the answer? Don’t worry, it’s pretty common. A lot of businesses make requests for web-based applications without first doing internal due diligence to understand their target market. Sure, you can build a web application that settles for the lowest common denominator — but why sacrifice when you might not have to?

Understanding your users’ browsing platform should be one of the first steps to building requirements for projects that involve a significant IT spend on web application development, whether it be enhancements to existing applications, or greenfield development.

Here’s 4 reasons why skipping this important step of due diligence will cost you more money, or users, or attention:

1. You’ll Be Too Conservative. Fearing that you’ll lose the 0.5% of users who may be on Internet Explorer 5.0, you’ll insist (against your CTO’s recommendation) that all users are important, and if it means sacrificing a few bells and whistles, so be it.
2. You’ll Be Too Boring. You’ve heard about rich internet applications, Web 2.0, AJAX? If you’re trying to support these new technologies on browsers that are 5+ years old, forget it.
3. You’ll Spend Too Much. The 80/20 rule will be in full effect when you realize late in the development cycle that no one tested with Netscape 7.2. “But it’s in the requirements document!” cries the project sponsor. Frantic testing will unveil the fact that half the functionality is broken or visually skewed. You fire the designer, and the project goes into a death march to the lowest common denominator.
4. You’ll Be Unhappy with the Final Product. You’re building the web application to replace your mainframe claims processing system. Or your billing system. Or your financial forecasting package. And the final, boring mess will look exactly like what you had on your old green-screen system, except it’s different. Users are complaining that it’s not easy to use, and your CFO is now revisiting your ROI projections. Projects aren’t supposed to end like this… are they?

Fortunately, judicious use of web analytics and good old fashioned business analysis can provide you with concrete data to build a solid foundation of business cases and technical requirements. The chart below illustrates browser market share over the past 9 months:

Source: StatCounter Global Stats, April 2009

You can see that the bulk of market share goes to a very small percentage of very modern and powerful browsers. How can this information help you? In Part 2 of this series, we’ll explore how up-front legwork in web application development can lead to a happy outcome for all.

Online Social Networking Revenue: Part II

submitted by Ken Allard

In the first post in this series, I wrote about companies that have new online revenue potential by virtue of being brokers of goods or services or by owning a significant share of market.  In this entry, I will explore the revenue opportunities for more traditional content owners who answer yes to question number 3:

1. Do you act as a broker of goods or services?
2. Do you provide content or advice to a significant percentage of a specific industry or consumer segment?
3. Are you facing new competitors who generate revenue by aggregating audience around your content or by providing meta-content?
4. Do you have data or knowledge within your organization that is obscure to your clients?
5. Do you serve an audience that is highly fragmented?

Most traditional media companies have faced dramatic profit losses as their audiences have flocked from physical products to online alternatives.  It is ironic that their proprietary content gained intrinsic value online while simultaneously losing its ability to generate income.  Music labels have watched in dismay as their content is shared, and worse yet distributed to thousands, without resulting in direct sales.  Publishers have seen the value of their vast collection of high-priced text-books diminished as students rely on digital sources of  content and publish notes and answers to study questions on their own personal sites.  Even super-star authors like J.K. Rowling, find themselves battling superfans who create valuable media properties by adding meta-content (e.g. character lists, family trees, etc.) around their published works.  (She won that court case, but who wants to start suing fans?)

It is an unfortunate paradox, that while the Internet has dramatically increased the popularity, utility, and accessibility of all kinds of proprietary content, it has simultaneously and systematically erased the revenue models that most traditional companies have relied upon.  Nearly every consumer content company has decided that both paid subscription and fee per article/data slice business models are dead online.  (Consumer Reports is one of the last notable hold-outs.)  Proprietary business to business content services have not been as severely impacted, but they too are not recognizing opportunities to increase profits.  I believe that these organizations are failing to monetize their content because they are failing to take advantage of the fact that it is more popular, useful, accessible and social once it is available in online media.  The key to new revenue is to exploit these inherent benefits:

1. 1. Popular – Content should be marketed to , optimized for, and appreciated by the broadest possible relevant audience
   2. Useful – Content should be helpful, active, purpose driven and immersive
   3. Accessible – Content should be open, pervasive across devices, and present in the right context
   4. Social – Content should be viewed as the basis for an interaction between people, author-consumer, consumer-consumer, consumer-group, author-group

The most successful online initiatives exploit these online advantages.  Let’s look at a few different examples of companies who have already taken the right steps or who may be missing new revenue opportunities:

Universal Music (various artist Web sites) - Universal Music, like most other major music labels, is failing to monetize its content online, abdicating the revenue to various unrelated 3^rdparty entertainment sites, direct to consumer commerce sites, and fan sites.  Music labels have always treated their artist Web sites as marketing brochures for new album releases.  Rather than taking advantage of a direct to consumer connection that could deliver revenue from direct sales of music content, advertising, sponsorship, auctions of unique memorabilia, ongoing engagement with fans, and countless other revenue opportunities, they have simply failed to connect with their audience online. Despite the fact that the “official artist Web site” typically appears first in organic search results, fans spend very little time on most artist Web sites.  Instead they are shuttled off to other media properties, e.g. MySpace,YouTube, or fan run sites, where they have richer opportunities to interact with each other and the music content.  While the music labels do in fact face numerous obstacles in securing all of the rights (because of complicated artist royalty contracts) to generate revenue by using the content online, they often fail to make even a modest attempt to take advantage of the enormous online social energy that propels popular artists.

Nelly is a multi-grammy winning hip-hop artist on a Universal music label.  His official Web site is www.nelly.net.  It is a good example of the typical artist Web site.  It scores moderate to very low on the four measures outlined above:

 

Popular – While the site is optimized to be the top returned site for organic search for the word “nelly”, many other sites (e.g. YouTube, MySpace, nellyhq, and lastfm) appear just below the top result and offer better content.  Also, other entertainment sites like AOL and Yahoo have bought paid search results that draw fans away from the official site.  Lastly, the site content is not really targeted to the fans that would likely be searching for it.

Useful – If you are a Nelly fan, it is unlikely that you would find any content on this site that would make you want to come back.  It is generic, “official,” promotional content with no special features (behind the scenes, personal interactions with the artist, “bootleg” versions of the songs) that real fans would likely be looking for. 

Accessible – The site does allow users to buy ringtones for mobile devices and subscribe to a basic RSS feed. 

Social – In terms of generating revenue from an online fan base, this site is a total failure.  Fans who click on community are shuttled off to myspace.  There is no opportunity for fans to upload photos or videos from concerts.  There isn’t even an opportunity for basic fan interaction.  While the site apparently is generating some add revenue, it does little to engage fans to stay on the site or to ever come back.  Conversely, the two sites below are both aggregating an audience based on nelly’s content and monetizing the audience much more aggressively with direct commerce opportunities, numerous advertisements, and offers to join communities of users with like interests.

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Universal Music has abdicated the energized network of online fans to a multitude of unaffiliated sites.  While music labels have historically generated revenue by earning royalties on the sales of recorded music, they certainly have the opportunity to gain more rights from artists by creating immersive music experiences for their fans.  Instead of taking advantage of their relationship with and unique access to their artists to create a deluge of fresh, “meta” content online, music labels have resorted to keeping their official sites as anemic online marketing brochures.

MLB Advanced Media (www.mlb.com) - While there are thousands of fan sites and sports sites, MLB.com is undisputed premier site for baseball.  It is the opposite of the official artist Web sites most music labels develop.  Major League Baseball has been extremely aggressive in monetizing its content online, transforming what was once printed pages of scores and sports stories controlled by hundreds of physical media newspapers into a bonanza of advertising, auction, gaming, merchandise, and subscription revenue.  It gets high scores in all respects:

Popular - The site is optimized to be the top returned site for organic search for the word “baseball” or any professional baseball team on major search engines.  It almost always is one of the top 3 choices for player names as well.  It either advertises on or has affiliate relationships with other top baseball or related content sites like baseball.com.  Registration for any feature is easy.  All that is required is an e-mail address and a password. Yet, the site is establishing opportunities to learn more and more about its users over time as people flesh out their profiles as they participate in games, contests, and sign up for additional services.

Useful - If you are a baseball fan, this site has everything baseball related that you could possibly want to consume.  It is completely immersive.  Team sites, player sites, online games, auctions, subscriptions to streaming video, tickets, history, stats, blogs, forums, etc; It is hard to imagine what other kind of content they could add.  The content is active.  Users of the site have a plethora of opportunities to interact with the content.  They can play any number of fantasy sports games, some of which offer opportunities to stay engaged for a whole season, others which offer faster gratification, asking users to compete on the basis of their ability to pick streaks (e.g. winning, hitting, stealing, etc.) 

Accessible – The site allows users to deliver the content to any device.  It has numerous mobile offerings.  Users can also subscribe to RSS feeds by team or for the whole league.

Social – MLB.com has truly exploited the social nature of its entertainment content.  The fantasy sports games are an excellent example of an online social networking revenue opportunity.  Commodity data is used as the basis to bring fans together to compete in fantasy leagues.  These games increase engagement, impressions, repeat visits, duration of visit, and switching costs to competitive sites.  While fantasy sports is perhaps the best example of a social application based on content, the site also seeks to build community through more common approaches such as blogsmessage boards, and forums.

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MLB.com uses its content to aggregate an audience and generate revenue through many mechanisms: direct sales of merchandise, auctions, advertising, sponsorships, subscriptions, and ticket sales.  While not all of these opportunities are directly related to online social networks, the users of the site and their ability to interact with each other and the content are what make it successful and differentiate it from static print-based publications and many online versions of traditional media.  Also, instead of giving its content away and allowing a plethora of 3^rd party sites and superfans to monetize its assets, MLB.com has taken an aggressive approach to be the best place to immerse oneself in baseball and get the most unique, exclusive access to players and memorabilia.

BusinessWeek(www.businessweek.com) - BusinessWeek is a traditional print publication that targets a general business audience and has developed an effective online version of its publication.  It is filled with breaking AP stories, proprietary news stories and commentary and is suffering from the same decline in revenue that most traditional publishers are facing.  In 2008, BusinessWeek launched Business Exchange, pithily marketed with the tag line, “Track and share business stories across the Web.”  The Web site allows users to “create business topics, collaboratively aggregate content from the entire Web and connect with other business focused users around these topics.”  It is a great tool for business users to research and/or stay current on business trends that are important to them.  The tool is easy to use and seamlessly integrated with LinkedIn.  While the service is still new, I think that it has the potential to truly differentiate and potentially transform BusinessWeek.

Popular – Business Exchange is presented to users as a tab off the home page.  It is unlikely that non-BusinessWeek users will find it because it has not really established itself as a “destination site” yet and it is unlikely that users will start searching for it.  The popularity of the site could be significantly enhanced with some marketing and PR.   Still, activity on the site is certainly respectable, and any curious business person could easily lose themselves browsing through the many user-generated blogs and stories that are posted there.

Useful – The site offers a lot of utility.  In fact, in my opinion, it notably beats search engines for getting up to speed about new issues or tracking new stories about chosen topics.  It is also provides integrated, contextually relevant opportunities to network with other users and find potential thought partners, new employees, or prospects in a targeted way.  The site has the opportunity to add twitter like capabilities in the future that might add to its overall utility.

Accessible – User profiles are seamlessly integrated with LinkedIn.  This makes it easier to sign up and start with a well-populated profile.  The LinkedIn integration also sets the right context for users. 

Social – In terms of generating revenue from an online user base, this new service has the potential to really impact BusinessWeek’s success.  The magazine has truly embraced the open, collaborative nature of the Web.  Rather than trying to cling to a strategy of differentiation by content, the site is transforming itself into a useful business tool.  While the BusinessWeek brand and content are still important, Business Exchange recognizes that the vast network of readers may have as much or more content to offer than its own staff of writers and editors.  Also, the service has an opportunity to segment and even publicly “tag” users by their reading behavior in addition to users’ explicit self-ascribed tags and interests.  I hope that this service gets some more press and attention as it is an ambitious step forward for a traditional print publication.

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At the most basic level Business Exchange will help increase revenue by helping the magazine to grow its user base and dramatically increase user engagement and thereby advertising revenue.  As the service evolves and learns more about its users, it will have opportunities to offer additional business service products such as recruiting and marketing services.

Social Networking Revenue Strategies
There are three basic approaches that these companies have pursued or should pursue to generate new revenue.

1. Transform traditional content sites into tools by embracing the open, collaborative nature of the Web. (
   http://bx.businessweek.com/
   )
2. Aggressively exploit all aspects of your content and your community, paying special attention to meta content opportunities (e.g. baseball stats, behind the scenes artist information), user-generated content (e.g. bootlegs and concert videos), and other forms of user interaction (e.g. games, lists, contests) (www.mlb.com)
3. Treat highly fragmented media properties (e.g artist Web sites) as a network.  By aggregating the audiences of smaller sites, companies have an opportunity to increase potential advertising and commerce revenue.

Generating Revenue through Social Networks: Part I

submitted by Ken Allard

Many organizations are struggling to understand why they should care about online social networks. They narrowly define them as blogs and message boards and dismiss both their relevance and their potential to generate new revenue. I believe that by failing to directly develop initiatives related to community many companies are missing opportunities to take advantage of the inherent network benefits that online services can offer.

Here are five qualifying questions that companies should ask themselves to see if they have an opportunity to generate revenue by fostering the growth of an online social network:

1. Do you act as a broker of goods or services?

2. Do you provide content or advice to a significant percentage of a specific industry or consumer segment?

3. Are you facing new competitors who generate revenue by aggregating audience around your content or by providing meta-content?

4. Do you have data or knowledge within your organization that is obscure to your clients?

5. Do you serve an audience that is highly fragmented?

Any company that answers yes to any of these questions may have an opportunity grow their revenue. In this blog series, I will explore each of these questions and provide case study examples of organizations that have the potential to launch profitable social networking initiatives or those that already have them in place.

Let’s start with the first two questions:

1. Do you act as a broker of goods or services?

2. Do you provide content or advice to a significant percentage of a specific industry or consumer segment?

Companies that can answer yes to either or both of these questions have perhaps the richest opportunity to profit from social networking. Fortunately, a wide variety of organizations fit into this category. Let’s look at four different examples:

Wine Spectator – Wine spectator has an offline paid subscriber magazine that includes access to a Website. The magazine’s content includes stories about wine trends, wine auctions, experiences, travel, food, and other lifestyle content. Perhaps the most valuable content that the magazine provides is its expert ratings and tasting notes about wine. Wine Spectator’s wine experts are so respected and revered that their ratings immediately affect the price and the availability of wine.

While the offline magazine is interesting and a useful wine guide, the Web site has transformed the value of the publication. First it is a database of all the tasting notes and ratings for every wine that the magazine has evaluated. Hence, anyone looking for a review of a specific wine before making a purchase, has immediate access to an expert rating that provides valuable information and pricing guidance. If you haven’t yet figured this out, I am a huge wine enthusiast). The Web site takes this benefit a huge step forward, however, by enhancing the recommendations of their experts with the opinions of the entire Wine Spectator community. The Web site also allows each member to build an online inventory of their own wine collection with their own tasting notes and ratings which they can share with all other members.

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Thus, the publication has greatly expanded the content available to all members and has significantly increased the utility of the Web site. Members share their own entertaining stories about their wine experiences with each bottle, what food they served with it, and their own perspectives about the quality of the wine. This social feature increases the revenue of the site by increasing page impressions (i.e. advertising revenue), engagement, and subscription stickiness. While I do not have access to any proprietary information, I am certain that the renewal rate for members who have entered their entire wine collection online is significantly higher than that of those who are passive readers.

Consumer Reports – Consumer Reports is an enormously respected magazine and Web site, published by the non-profit organization Consumers Union. This organization has been helping consumers make smarter purchases for decades and provides a valuable public protection and public advocacy service. Consumer Reports ratings and rankings of products are distinguished from any other source in that they are independent, objective, and scientific. The organization tests each product with sound, consistent methodologies. (The facilities are amazing. If you are ever in Yonkers, contact the organization to see if you can get a tour of the testing facilities. It is a fascinating experience).

The organization is serious about its mission and the scientific nature of its ratings. Thus, it has chosen to limit and often exclude the product opinions of its readers. Subscribers to the Web site may go to separate forums to discuss product quality, but unlike Wine Spectator or other sites like Amazon.com, member opinions and reviews are not integrated into specific product ratings.

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I believe that the organization is missing an opportunity to increase engagement, page views, and subscription renewals, by limiting the ability of consumers to learn from each other and to participate in the process of evaluating products. On the Web, people want to participate. They want sites to offer utility, convenience, and an integrated experience. Sometimes brands and policies need to evolve to remain relevant.

Reed Construction – Reed Construction is a business to business service that offers content to the entire construction industry, including contractors, architects, and product companies. Contractors and other suppliers seeking work or new sales can gain access to a database of new projects, building plans, and building specifications. This is a high value, premium content service, with paid subscriptions being the primary source of revenue. Reed, however, is failing to address a large part of the potential subscriber market.

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Reed is a kind of non-traditional broker of goods and services. While not directly enabling a transaction between two parties, their information is directly facilitating a transaction. Currently, Reed only provides content to one half of the purchasing dynamic, the suppliers. With the power of a proprietary social network, Reed could also provide information and advice to the businesses and developers who are seeking products and services. By developing some simple Web applications, data capture standards, and analytical frameworks, Reed could rate, rank, and categorize all suppliers of goods and services, relying largely on outcomes data gathered from the developers. Like Amazon and E-bay do with their networks of consumers and independent sellers, Reed has the opportunity to use the social network of professional developers who may be geographically dispersed but who share a common set of experiences with products and service providers to gather outcomes and ratings data that can be valuable in making future purchasing decisions. By failing to monetize their true network, Reed is leaving at least half of the potential market unserved.

Hamptons Real Estate Online – Hamptons Real Estate Online is the leading source of listings information for anyone looking to buy or rent a house on the east end of Long Island. It is not all that different from any other real estate site except that it is not specific to any specific broker and it offers and extremely easy to use interface and set of search and browse utilities. It is also a little different in that it serves a very specific regional community and its database of rentals and properties for sale is quite comprehensive. In effect, it is the one place to go to for this information. The site makes money by collecting listing fees. It is essentially a new form of a newspaper classifieds.

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Hamptons Real Estate Online is missing a revenue opportunity by failing to fully recognize that it is serving a distinct community. The collection of towns and villages that comprise the Hamptons is essentially a large, linked resort community. People buy and sell houses repeatedly. They often rent a different property every year. Real Estate is a hobby of sorts and the mass of people that returns to the Hamptons each year needs services that are specific to their property rentals or purchases. Yet, the Web site (unlike others that cater to a people seeking information about rentals, e.g. http://www.vacationrentals.com) does not capture any feedback from previous renters about the quality of the property. It also does not present any advertising or classified information about the services that renters or new home buyers often need such as cleaning, landscaping, pool service, or contractors. Essentially, the site is failing to monetize its community. The site could also greatly add utility to its site by presenting additional information about the homes that are listed (e.g. previous sale price and ownership history all of which is publicly available but fragmented) and allowing users to register and maintain information.

Three Basic Social Networking Strategies

There are three basic approaches that these companies have pursued or should pursue to generate new revenue.

1. Add value to existing content by gaining audience feedback or additional user-generated content. (e.g. Wine Spectator)
2. Capture data about how your community interacts with its suppliers or service providers and about the transaction itself to inform or advise future product development, marketing, or purchasing decisions. (Hamptons Real Estate Online, Reed Construction )
3. Add content to your offering to extend your services beyond your core service. (Consumer Reports)

In the next post in this series I will address opportunities related to question number three:

3.  Are you facing new competitors who generate revenue by aggregating audience around your content or by providing meta-content?

Building a Collaborative Enterprise: Facebook

Facebook has surpassed the BBC in the UK, and, as of November 2008, is the #13 most visited site in the United States (source: comScore.com). Although it is mostly a consumer-focused site, businesses without a Facebook strategy may be missing a key component of their internet vision.

What is Facebook?

Facebook is a social networking application that lets users keep up with their friends, and exchange photos, location updates, and thousands of other activites due to its rich application development capabilities.

Why Facebook?

Facebook has the unique position to put your company in front of millions of users, both through traditional targeted online advertising as well as grassroots popularity.

Enterprises can take advantage of the broad reach, as well as users’ social graphs, by adapting their business processes to integrate with the metadata available there.

In contrast to MySpace, Facebook is far more structured, with a rigid template and page set up allowing very little design and content freedom. Although some users may find it limiting, it does mean less opportunity for abuse. For example, users can become “fans” of or companies or products, creating fan networks, but they can’t start boycott or other negative campaigns within Facebook’s standard template.

Example: WorkLight WorkBook

WorkLight’s WorkBook, released late last year, is the first of what are likely to be many applications that integrate with users’ existing social graphs in Facebook. These hybrid applications will take advantage of the rich Facebook API, while at the same time provide integration with enterprise systems via single-sign on and a unified data architecture. WorkLight has the benefit of already having an established presence in many large companies, where adoption rate and accessibility will be critical to their widespread success across the enterprise.

Brand Awareness

Enterprises will be significantly cutting back on marketing expenses in calendar year 2009 – making it a perfect time to explore Facebook as a low cost of entry marketing platform. Major consumer brands such as Jeep, Red Bull, and Coca-Cola have already invested heavily over the past 2 years in developing content and building audiences.

Late 2008 and early 2009 will bring business-oriented users to Facebook, looking to network for leads and build brand awareness and loyalty. This may result in fostering communities of “friends”, from smaller corporate divisions like Cisco Corporate Communications on up to General Electric.

I believe that a social media campaign is a lot harder, a lot more resource intensive than many marketers realize. Starting one without the ability to maintain it, is a form of brand suicide. Like blogs whose last entry was a year ago, an abandoned social media campaign shows both a lack of understanding and a lack of real engagement. — Simon Salt, CEO, IncSlingers

“Facebook-Like” Applications

In a future blog post, we plan on exploring what I believe is more likely to occur in 2009, that is the rise of “Facebook-Like” applications inside the corporate firewall. Most major enterprise software vendors are developing or releasing products to provide functionality similar to Facebook, adapting it for use in the enterprise. Product vendors such as Socialtext exemplify the types of products we are likely to see inside the firewall in the near future.

Related Articles

• What’s in your [Corporate] Facebook?
• Facebook and Building Brand Awareness

If Master Data Management is on your agenda

Start with Data Quality

Many organizations are currently working on Master Data Management (MDM) strategies as a core IT initiative. One of the fastest paths to failure for these large, multiyear initiatives is to ignore the quality of the data. This is a good post on other MDM design pitfalls.

Master Data Management (MDM) is defined as the centralization or single view of X (Customer, Product or other reference data) in an enterprise. Wikipedia says: “master data management (MDM) comprises a set of processes and tools that consistently defines and manages non-transactional data entities of an organization (also called reference data).” MDM typically is a large, multiyear initiative with significant investments in tools, with two to five times the investment in labor or services to enable the integration of subscribing and consuming systems. For many companies you are talking millions of dollars over the course of the implementation. According to Forrester, on average, cross-enterprise implementations range anywhere from $500K to $2 million and professional services costs are usually two dollars for every dollar of software license costs. When you consider integration of all your systems for bi-directional synchronization for customer or product information, the services investment over time can be up to five times the license cost.

At its simplest level, MDM is like a centralized data pump or the heart of your customer or product data (the most popular implementations). But once you hook this pump up, if you haven’t taken care of the quality of the data first, what have you done? You have just spent millions of dollars in tools and effort to pollute the quality of data across the entire organization.

Unless you profile the systems to be integrated, the quality of the data is impossible to quantify. The analysts who work with the data in a particular system have an idea of what areas are suspect (e.g., “we don’t put much weight in the forecast of X because we know the data is sourced from our legacy distribution system which has data ‘problems’ or ‘inconsistencies’”). The problem is that the issues are known at the subconscious level but are never quantified, which means a business case to fix the issues never materializes or gets funding to make improvements. In many cases, the business is not aware there is a problem until they try to mine a data source for business intelligence.
According to a study by the Standish Group, 83% of data integration/migration projects fail or overrun substantially due to a lack of understanding of the data and its quality. Anyone ever work on a data integration project or data mart or data warehouse that ran long? I have, and I’m sure most of the people reading this have too.

The good news is that data profiling and analyzing is a small step you can undertake now to prepare and position yourself for the larger MDM effort. With the right tools, you can assess the quality of the data in your most important data sources in as little as three weeks depending upon the number of tables and attributes. Further, it is an inexpensive way to ensure that you are laying the foundation for your MDM or Business Intelligence initiatives. It is much more expensive to uncover your data quality problems in user acceptance testing. Many times it is fatal.

Success of your MDM initiative depends on the quality of the data – you can profile and quantify your data quality issues now to proactively head off problems down the road and build a business case to implement improvement in your existing data assets (marts, warehouses and transactional systems). The byproduct of this analysis is that you can improve the quality of the business intelligence derived from these systems and help the business make better decisions with accurate information.

Building a Collaborative Enterprise: Twitter (Part 2)

This is the second post in a series of posts covering collaborative tools that can make an impact on your business. If you’re new to Twitter, I’d suggest you read part 1 first.

Why Twitter?: Internal Collaboration

Honestly, many of the very creative ways Twitter can be used as a real-time communication platform probably haven’t been invented yet. Here are some creative ideas we came up with using an internal poll on our Sharepoint site:

• Server or systems uptime monitoring and alerts (tying into Twitters excellent SMS capability with major cell phone carriers)
• Corporate workflow integration and notifications – new business notification / blasts, integration with development workflow, etc.
• Events planning and communication – for companies that sponsor annual users’ group meetings, setting up a dedicated Twitter account to communicate details and updates to attendees

Enterprise Use

Especially for large companies, something like Twitter can even take the place of other solutions (such as Office Communications Server), or (as in many companies I’ve seen) public IM services such as Yahoo or AOL. IM services that function outside the company may present serious security risks, including exposure to vicious worms or malware.

Companies such as Yammer and Present.ly are springing up, providing Twitter-like services running for private intra-company enterprise use. These provide the benefits of Twitter, including collaboration and greater dissemination of information, while retaining privacy that enterprises mandate.

While the market for corporate Twitter-like products is still in flux, examining the options available should be an important part of your enterprise collaboration strategy. With recent management changes at Twitter, it is highly likely that Twitter will be introducing a for-pay Enterprise service in the near future. Twitter CEO Evan Williams recently stated that

There is commercial value, not just personal value [to Twitter]

Integration

Twitter provides a very rich series of web services that can be used to integrate Twitter accounts with many existing back-office systems – both for receiving incoming tweets (imagine your Twitter feed integrated with salesforce.com, for example), and for outgoing tweets (imagine integrating QuickBase or Microsoft Dynamics to drive marketing campaigns). The Twitter web services can easily be integrated into existing Java, .NET, or Ruby on Rails infrastructure.

Downsides

Because Twitter is a realtime mass communication mechanism, gaffes can hurt you very quickly, since bad or inappropriate twitstream content will assuredly ripple through the as Internet fast as possible. Additionally, Twitter serves as a very rapid sounding board for poorly vetted social media ideas by aggregating feedback from thousands of users or consumers.

A very recent example of this from November 15-16, 2008 was the very strong consumer backlash to Motrin’s new advertising campaign. Immediately after the advertising campaign was released, negative comments on Twitter began piling up, causing Motrin to decide to pull the ad from its online media campaign.

On many corporate blogs, and certainly traditional “press release” communications outlets, content is reviewed, re-reviewed, and approved many times over before being released for public consumption. Part of a corporate Twitter strategy should include a good understanding (and documentation) of rules of engagement and proper Twitter etiquette, since a traditional review process would be cumbersome and reduce the “immediateness” of responses.

Name Squatting

With the uptick in corporate attention being paid to Twitter, “Twitter squatting” is starting to be noticed by corporations. Much as “domain squatting” happened in the early days of the Internet, Twitter squatting could be potentially either damaging or expensive for companies that don’t own their name. Twitter doesn’t yet have an official policy of releasing names to trademark holders (unlike, for example, domain squatting); however, they will release “inactive” accounts, and I’d bet they will have a policy on this issue very soon.

Should You Twitter?

In the current highly-connected and collaborative business climate, companies must have a social media strategy. Companies must understand all of the major social media platforms and identify how they will bring value to the business.

Twitter has provided a unique service, and many companies, especially ones that deal with B2C services, should consider a strong Twitter presence.

Next in our series of blog entries covering collaborative enterprises: Facebook.

Building a Collaborative Enterprise: Twitter (Part 1)

This is the first in a series of blog posts focusing on ways to integrate specific collaborative technology platforms into your enterprise.

We’ll do this by examining cutting-edge companies who have embraced collaborative technology, and provide some suggestions as to how these technologies might be applicable in different industries.

If you’re new to collaboration in the enterprise, we suggest you read this post by Edgewater’s Ori Fishler, reviewing McKinsey’s research on “enterprise 2.0″ collaborative technologies.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a public, free microblogging service. It allows users to publish short — 140 characters or less — updates to anyone who chooses to listen (the Twitter term is “follow”). Here’s a video to explain more succinctly (and humorously!) than I can:

Chances are, your company already has a public corporate blog presence (a recent study says over 55% of companies do). Your corporate blog is probably much like ours, providing insights, expertise, and guidance to your customers and potential customers. Blogs are generally written in an expository, formal style, providing rich and deep content, and an ability to converse through comments.

Contrast this with Twitter, where the 140 character limit profoundly restrains the amount of detailed dialog your can provide to (and have with) your followers. Companies like Southwest Airlines, Dell Computer, and Comcast have embraced this communication mechanism. The Wall Street Journal recently declared that Twitter is going mainstream. Why?

Why Twitter?: External Collaboration

While much of the focus around Twitter has been on enhancing interpersonal relationships, Twitter serves a unique niche for enterprises that early adopters can take advantage of. It is very difficult (or expensive) to get as close to your customers as Twitter allows through other means.

Areas such as customer relationship management, engagement, and marketing strategy are well-served by the opportunity provided through Twitter.

Brand Monitoring

Much like traditional media outlet monitoring, companies are advised to set up a strategy for watching Twitter for tweets about them.

Since Twitter is often a channel for stream-of-consciousness writing, mentions of companies are often interrelated with visceral experiences, both positive and negative. Delving into the subconscious is a savvy marketer’s dream come true!

A nascent industry has appeared with all sorts of tools to monitor companies’ mentions on Twitter, allowing them to be aware of what people are thinking. Smart companies such as Southwest and Zappos have taken this monitoring a step further, to an intervention approach.

“Today, whatever you say inside of a company will end up on a blog.” — Rusty Rueff

Much like blog/website watching services (such as Google Alerts), tweets regarding layoffs, client information, and other sensitive data must be carefully monitored so that information leaks can be identified before they lead to serious consequences (data or confidentiality breaches at worst, PR nightmares at best) for the company.

Customer Service

Twitter allows for a uniquely personal approach to customer service, providing customers with a way to bypass your standard support structure and (at least have the appearance of) talking to a real, live person. Unlike standard support or CRM systems, however, by default all Twitter conversations are public.

This openness allows a company that is willing to invest in well-trained and highly disciplined customer-focused service to shine in a way that was impossible before Twitter. Your concern for, and engagement on, customer issues will be visible for the whole world to see.

Many companies using Twitter for customer service make wise use of the Twitter direct messaging feature to bifurcate between directing responses containing personal information privately to the requester, while directing less sensitive responses as general replies for the public to see.

Marketing

While the ability to drive a rich marketing campaign through Twitter is limited to 140 characters, it’s possible that, by building a robust following through the techniques previously mentioned, you can deliver a strong message to your company’s followers, who are also likely to be your most ardent supporters.

Zappos created great, low-cost buzz when they randomly selected 10 of their 1,000+ followers to receive free pairs of shoes – brilliant marketing strategy targeted at their most loyal fans. Dell Computer Corporation regularly distributes exclusive coupon offers to their followers.

Sales

While there aren’t a lot of good examples of deals being brokered via Twitter, a couple bigger companies are experimenting and have shown marked success.

An Irish insurance company, FBD Insurance, has begun using Twitter to provide auto insurance quotes and other product information to potential customers.

Dell Computer Corporation launched its @DellOutlet Twitter account in June 2007. By the time 1 year had passed, Dell could trace over $500,000 in sales to links clicked through its twitstream.

To be Continued…

In our next post on Twitter, we’ll cover enterprise options, other creative uses, and potential downsides.

Related Links

• Twitter How-To, by Adam Covati

10 things you can do right now to improve your Enterprise Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities

1. Document examples of manulytics (manual analytics) activities to illustrate hidden fixed costs. Any BI investment initiative needs executive support and budget. You need to make a case for the investment to improve your BI capability and show the business a ROI (Return on Investment). The cost of the current manualytics activity needs to be documented to highlight the hidden fixed costs of the current way of doing business to help build consensus to make improvements.
2. Identify manualytics processes to be moved to production and automate.
3. Raise awareness of data as a corporate asset.
4. Enlist and cultivate a C-level executive sponsor for your Enterprise BI effort.
5. When the business asks a question that is difficult to answer – keep track of the level of effort expended to generate the information. How many analysts with spreadsheets are compiling information manually? When the answers accuracy are questioned, how much more time is spent proving the numbers are correct.
6. Development and document metadata wherever possible – Build in metadata requirements gathering into your SDLC – Create and standardize a process to capture table and column definitions and business logic into a standard format. Get tribal knowledge documented so that the business can continue to operate if people leave or move on.
7. Data Governance – develop a committee to work towards managing the data and IT assets of the organization.
8. Create/Assign data stewards for each of the source systems to agree on service level agreements for your source systems and resolve data quality issues.
9. Work to centralize your reference data – business hierarchies like department and product need to be centralized, agreed upon by all stakeholders – this is a task that can be driven by your corporate governance committee.
10. Don’t boil the ocean – Look for candidate pilot projects with a narrow scope to show quick wins to the business (90 day max.)
11. Work toward tool standardization – many organizations own one of each BI tool – work to standardize on one or two.
12. Build a Center of Excellence around BI and ETL – work to centralize your internal expertise for BI and ETL.

Well we ended up with twelve items, any one of which could fill a book or whitepaper and may be the subject of a future post.

As we work with different organizations, similar themes emerge. Every organization is different and your road to BI maturity is different from other companies. Sometimes it pays to have a fresh set of eyes come in and survey your current state to get you started on the right foot.