Will - Tell - Tail - Thaler

The Long Tail a Shaggy Dog Tail?

Will Page at Telco2 rolled out some results on research conducted with a "major online music hub", on "long tail economics". The long and the short of it (ta-dum!), is that the Internet and "physical retail" have the same distribution, and the long tail may not be serviceable at all. This is no simple contrarian view, Will knows his stuff and this is going into the Harvard Business Review. It really is interesting to compare to other social media studies of content creation, co-creation, and consumption.

Demming Undoes Detroit

In a week that sees Detroit on bended knee (albeit, one that was flown in on a private jet), Toyota continues to be a model of lean production values. McKinsey carry a piece on getting Toyota lean production into an organisation, and from what I can see, its the same thing that Toyota were expounding 30 years ago. Its our survival we are talking about, lets get responsible to each other, lets make it better every day. Yes there are tools, and yes their are techniques, but as the article says "Its the soft stuff that's hard to do".

The Inter-Temporal Choice of Swans

And if you were wondering (as I was a few days ago) as to why people make strange decisions around what they can and cannot afford to buy (and repay), Mr. Thaler of the Ole Black Swan has a paper on Inter-Temporal choice, a fancy way for saying people make dumb decisions when the results are times into the future. From simple experiments on discounting future money to social engineering in Virginia where if high school kids dropped out of school they lost their driving licence, reveal that many are unable to delay gratification into the future.

Go have a gander at the paper, its interesting.

Data Strategy, 1938

Notes from The Art of Conversation

by Milton Wright, 1936

The ability to talk well can be cultivated.

Interest you must have if your conversation is to be successful.

Interest can lie primarily in the subject or the person, the latter being by far the surer ingredient for success.

To chatter is easy. To talk resultfully with the hostile, suspicious, indifferent or even friendly is an art.

To really become a good conversationalist over the long term it is necessary to acquire the habit of conscientiously stocking your mind with facts and information and then forming opinions on the basis of that knowledge.

A monologue is not a conversation.

Silence plays an important part in effective conversation just as it does in music.

Masters of the art of conversation rarely give advice, and then, usually, only when requested. It is given tentatively and without seeming to impose their wishes.

The secret of giving advice successfully is to mix it up with something that implies a real consciousness of the adviser's own defects, and as much as possible of an acknowledgment of the other party's merits.

To plant a suggestion is a real test of conversational skill.

Behaviour and Action, Cause and Effect

 Oh Great Shiny Bubble

The New York Times gives a great visualisation of house value declines in the USA. Irish site FinFacts gives a long history of warning signs that went unheeded, and practices that drove this frenzied behaviour. But the question I really have is that even with all this information, and other information besides, would our behaviour and actions change? I mean lets face it lots of people knew we were in a housing bubble but most were still drawn to its shiny bubble surface. I think I need to dig a little into decision making within certain timeframe's and unreasonable weighing up of "perhaps lots of money next year", versus "reasonable money in ten years" (i.e. delayed gratification). Another way of looking at it could be the "problem of the commons" in that by acting in our own short term interest we brought about a collective collapse. Most commentators to date have focused on bad lending practices, but what about our own bad borrowing practices and our attitude to credit?

Data Is The Path To Insight?

I have been thinking that the key capability of a company may be the ability to generat Insight. But now, I am not so sure.(HT: Denis Pombriant)

“The necessary outcome of strategic planning is not analytical insight but resolve” (David Maister)

By this I am sure he means we know that the right things to do are, its just not always that interesting to keep doing them or to get them done. It does remind me of Werner Vogels at Telco2 saying that they knew (Amazon) that they had to focus on scope of catalogue, building visitor traffic, and lowering costs everywhere. Their "platform strategy" had to be a committed strategy, and joined up, and the management had to have the resolve to see it through, even though shareholders were unlikely to understand what they were doing, initially. Perhaps some of this resolve came from the CEO who has invested in some "dogs" in his day, but the learning led them to Platform strategy, and to Kindle, both billion dollar businesses. That and a "relentless focus on being customer centric".

So Why Is Customer Service Still In Trouble?

Well, perhaps its the small things that count. Mashable just posted up their take on a recent pew report that shows we are absolute crap at getting customer service, particularly around Tech support.

- 38% of users with failed technology contacted user support for help.
- 28% of technology users fixed the problem themselves.
- 15% fixed the problem with help from friends or family.
- 15% of tech users were unable to fix their devices.
- 2% found help online.

Consumers’ Attitudes About Various Forms of Tech Support:

- 72% felt confident that they were on the right track to solving the problem.
- 59% felt impatient to solve the problem because they had important uses for the broken technology.
- 48% felt discouraged with the amount of effort needed to fix the problem.
- 40% felt confused by the information that they were getting.

Wow, nearly 60% were so convinced the company wouldn't be able to give them good service, that they just didn't bother to call ! It felt like it was going to need a "big effort to fix", that it was making them feel "impatient", and then probably "discouraged" and angry? I think this may be a case of "interaction friction" before the customer even gets on the phone, or the web.

All This Miracles And We Are Still Miserable?

Eric over at Demand Satisfaction posted this video that just shows, perhaps, how unacceptably jaded we have become about the miracles of technology.

Tweet Tweet ! Your Company Has Flu...

I think I said this a good time ago now, but we are only barely using the Internet to track information that is socially useful. The BBC reports that Google is now helping map the spread of flu by tracking keyword searches.

Chis Barraclaugh, STL Partners at Telco2 last week had a great slide showing how all of Google's recent moves were investments in customer data.

Over at SAS Blog there was a nice back and forth on the strategic use of customer contact. It is so easy to forget that in large companies each section, dept, division wants to send messages, calls, letters to the end customer. These requests have be filtered, rated, and evaluated by the company itself.  Something in the back of my mind tells me that something this overall approach is ripe for some new thinking, like, here for instance. As if to reinforce this point, I saw the original SAS Blog entry because their SAS Magazine Editor is on Twitter, and she tweeted a link to the post.

Now what's with the pig? Well it goes to authenticity and two way value creation. I am a great believer that all customer interactions should be build to reduce the friction within the interaction, and should be seamlessly bound to the business process itself. We are on that journey here at VoiceSage.

Post Telco2

 

Telco2: Janus or Dear Jesus?

I think Mr. Enck called it well when he pointed out how impressive and pertinent Mr. Vogels presentation was. The clarity of strategic vision, the simplicity of focus, was awesome. What I found intriguing was that each iteration of the platform thinking defined a new element of the fly-wheel, a new virtuous reinforcement mechanism. They brought the merchants (merchant platform), so that "the catalogue" was the biggest on the web, your "go to" destination; they built traffic (Traffic Platform) through a kind of open linking strategy, opening out book references, and giving  incentives traffic of 4-7%revenue share. Most people would stop there, hey we have great customer traffic flow and the best stock available, cool. But no, they saw that they had to be the best price possible too, and this implied that they had to reduce the cost of infrastructure (answer: open out your Fulfillment platform so any merchant can send their product through the amazon warehousing network), and then the webstore platform, the enterprise service platform which is like a managed service for other web retailers (and a Labour platform, a Digital Media Platform, an Infrastructure Platform, and yes, a Telco Platform). As amazing as this journey, this evolution was, three things struck me with laser clarity:

- These guys have complete clarity on their strategic principles and will take big hits to protect them;

- They pay attention to "micro-incentives" and "micro-barriers" to desired behaviours;

- They innovate around things that remain important over the long run, not just "new things".

If I were in the Strategic section of a Telco, I'd be looking to workshop my Two Sided Telco play with these guys in the room. On a personal level I met some old friends, and I think met some new and interesting people that I hope to follow up with.

Hack The World: Health and Telecommunications

Again, the excellent RRW has a piece on how mobile communications is being used in Africa to encourage people to see the Doctor and speak about their health concerns relating to TB and Aids. "Please Call Me" text messages are issued from Doctors to the population to encourage them to engage early; "Text reminders" are used to remind people to take their medication or attend a clinic; the call backs are handled by a virtual call centre of "people like you" that will understand your condition, your life, your emotions; mobile blood testing units are brought to the people so that they don't have to suffer the stigma of having to stand in line. If Telecommunications companies are wondering how context, content, community and communications can be braided together in ways that actually improve the state of the world, well, this is one fine example.

Note To Self: Human Beings Are Not "Self Loading Cargo Units".

Open - Networking

Hard Times For Big Vendors and Little Ones Alike?

In cold times it would seem mobile telecoms are still a Hot item (Tim Bray, Sun Microsystems, at FOWA London). People will give up that glass of wine, but not a $1.50 iPhone Application that gives them real value. And now that iPhone and Google have offline capability you can do a lot of great stuff. It is indeed a great time to build mobile applications, but I would also caution that 1998 was a great time to build a website, and building a website doesn't have a great reputation as a sure fire way to making you rich. Today the New York Times features Sun prominently as a company with big problems, so perhaps Tim's FOWA talk was from the heart. Some of these problems are good old fashioned competitive pressure in core product markets, and others are good old fashioned product development slippages. These are combined with the "slower than anticipated" update of its open source programs and initiatives (BTW: great piece from JP here on why Open Source may be stalling at the large enterprise level).

If you are thinking of building an application, Tim says "build it for yourself, its hard to understand the needs of others", there are others out there a lot like you and they will probably buy it. And watch out for the VC's, they don't understand 2.0, and they don't bring value (mmm, not sure of that one, know plenty of smart VC's). Gosh, this sounds like a sure way to end up on the bread line to me (but you will have your snazzy iPhone to keep you occupied). There is a reason people like "product managers" exist, just saying ye know. Its probably safer to think of Tim's comments as prods to get yourself multi-skilled, and to develop a "Career Portfolio".

The Elephant in the room is that most people are going to want to pay zero upfront to save money and are now being educated to "think like Google". I want it for free, or some version of it for free. I want it super simple. I want it to do one thing really really well. Agreed. One of my take aways from JP's posting is "the Enterprise has been trained to think like Microsoft", and this frames all enterprise adoption arguments in Microsoft's favour. What I particularly found interesting was the focus not on Excel, but on Excel Micros as a significant barrier to adoption of OpenOffice, and that the cascading effects this had on the need to redesign the Macro's, estimate the cost of the same, estimating the cost of failure. At the end of the day, the purchasing dept used the study to beat up Microsoft on price, and buy, uh hum, more Microsoft product.

What Do Tough Times Mean For The Enterprise?

Tim Bray was of the opinion that tough times might mean that companies look more to SaaS and to Open Source solutions. I do like the emphasis on "SaaS" and "cloud based" applications and services, of course I do, that's what we do around here. But the take away for me is the need to seriously look your "customers life right now" (i.e. the real life issues they are facing, the hard choices, the unpalatable trade offs). In my opinion, its easy to say "we are your partner" in good times and ask for some hefty integration and consulting fees to prove it. Lets see how good a problem solver you are now; lets see how flexible and adaptable you are now; lets see how your DNA shines through?. As a provider of SaaS you should now be looking deeply at some strategies for maintaining your value proposition. Tough times for the Enterprise customer means even SaaS entities need to bring a razor sharp focus on time to meaningful ROI.

I think its a great idea that Tim was encouraging developers to not only skill up, but look at legacy skills (Cobal etc), and cross-skilling. Companies can equally do the same thing.Taking charge of your own Identity by building your own personal network, blog, twitter, get into social networks, and social network at events are great personal brand builders. Get known, and get known for something. Now ask yourself, "what is Sun now known For"?

Some Cool New Media Business Models

Have you ever needed to read a children's book from cover to cover before you bought it because let face it, you will be reading it every night for a long long time. Lookybook lets you see the whole book before you buy it. And here's the one we have to buy (Its Not Fair), as we have a new arrival due in March 2009. Music sites like Ineem and LaLa have similar models for music in that they let you play the content, in its entirety, while you remain browsing on the site, no doubt hoping that the longer you hang around the more likely you are to buy a web song for 10c. I think a lot of companies are going to have to look at approaches that enable you to have a complete "experience" and that you may then proceed to commit to buying it, owning it, sharing it or some other upstream action that is predicated on shared value creation. It is a deep delayering of the digital value chain, with the understanding that some parts of the chain can better gather and aggregate data from multiple services and location, and that this will help them outpace offers that are more vertically integrated.

So here's the tie up: people buy experiences.

The enterprise customer is a person like you, and they want a great experience of your service, they want to be able to test and trial it and experience it and not pay for it until they know they like it, that it works. They want reliability, they want security, they want credentials, but these are "hygiene factors". The Enterprise's professionalised buying process will simply not allow them to buy in services that don't "stack up" in the traditional purchasing decision cycle. I personally believe that their will be an iTunes for Applications at the Enterprise level. Click Click Click. Done.

Let's Get (meta) Physical?

Linkedin goes Social: now you can add applications and collaborate with your contact network. This is so boneheaded it beggars belief IMHO. I can see social objects as being useful to Linkedin in that they are social evidence of influence, popularity, or expertise. Thus, your sheer volume of network contacts speaks volumes about your rolodex if you are a sales director; your online presentations show you as an expert marketing person capable of speaking to C-Level executives at conferences; your embedded Google Spreadsheets show a deep understanding of risk and analytics. I have begun to think of Linkedin as a good forum for social validation of a contact (hey, what do you think of John, did he really do such a great job at company x?) and an extendable element into other environments (Everyone on SAP could now have a linkedin directory of both internal and external experts and contacts through a linkedin mashup).

We are the Adobe Reader here, the Recruiters are the Adobe Acrobat. Give the recruiters the heavy tools, just make it 3-click easy for us to use.

(and what's with the Meta-Physical? Linkedin encourages us to only linked with people we actually know, ie. real contacts).

Update: RWW seems to present the LinkedIn Applications in the mode of being Social Objects, which is fair enough, but I still think Linkedin needs to BE THE SOCIAL OBJECT, not be the place where you can bring your social objects.

Insight - Interact - Improve

Super posting from SAS on Customer Contact Strategy, especially the problem of saturating the customer with customer contact (email, mail shots, phone calls, etc. etc.) You have to have a clear understanding when to contact, in what mode, and to make what offer. That may mean you need to segment your customers on the basis of how they want to be contacted. I think the SAS post misses some key points but they do get that all your communication to the customer needs to be planned and integrated into an overall strategy. Neat idea of "the recently rule", ie. you can't call your customer twice in 60 days with an offer. Also good example of not messaging cross-offers to customers that are "churn risk". This means you have to have a pretty solid view of what the "interaction rules are" for each segment. However, completely misses the idea to create real two way value through better interaction management.

Jeff Jarvis has a very nice piece on WWGD (What Would Google Do?) in terms of the downturn in the economy.  Such as look at how relationships in themselves signal value, or ARE value; making physical products is probably a decaying strategy or just plain ole very hard to make money at (Dell?); big companies are really networks of small companies; in a network driven economy you should strive to be the platform; transparency will drive trust; the more control you hand over to users the more trust you build, and the stronger your relationships. Most of these points come from his effort to deconstruct what has made Google so successful. Could Dell execute on being your "design to build" for IT & Consumer Media products? It has most of the business and technical infrastructure to achieve this.

John  Quelch over at HBS re-posts ideas on The Middle Aged Simplifier which basically says that this category (sic) of person is looking to de-layer their product ownership-positions (sic) in that they are going to happy to not own so much non-essential stuff, and will lease cars, holiday homes etc. in a variety of non-mass-consumer modes. I think the undertone of this piece is interesting none the less because it might signal an even older marketing lesson: if everyone else has your stuff (read 4x4 "landrover") then it has no social status, and no brand communications value. Perhaps "the experience economy" is going to truly expand.

Oh, and just in case anyone is dropping in here, and doesn't know, I am http://www.twitter.com/PaulSweeney

How We Pay

Buyer Behaviour USA

USA Today report people are using their credit cards "dramatically less" either because they are maxed out, or are worried about the cost of their credit card debt.  The customers of Wall Mart are also buying their baby milk formula early in the month, presumably when they are relatively cash rich compared to the mid month or end of month. People are also buying fewer brand names, and are decreasing the frequency of their shopping trips. Offering different payment options or times to pay might be a great way to overcoming being the "last bill of the month".

HT Pistachio and PKedrosky

Other take away's from this story:

- If your business is built on one known shopping pattern, think again. It might have changed. Specifically I am thinking about how customers weigh up categories (Food vs Travel; Car vs Bus, etc.)

- Broad based "scale competitors" like Tesco may have insights into the recession mega-trends. Maybe by following some of their announcements, add on's, technology adoptions, they might add as bell weathers for what other companies should do?

- Focus: there is lots of talk out there around the need to understand what you do as a business, and what core "benefits" you deliver. You probably don't need one more feature. But there is another element to Focus, and that is "strategic focus". If you are a higher end fashion store, selling "more economic lines" could blur your focus. Wall Mart is a cost leader, so these mega-trends expand its addressable base.

Break The Current Value or Activity Chain?

- If your customers are now increasingly cost conscious, how about making them a re-designed offer? Get 10% off if you buy completely online and NEVER call us :)

- Strip out the product offering until you are left with the core utility, and then give the customer option to re-bundle features "on demand"?

- Make some products "services" (i.e. buy the 24/7 totally connected office for $40/month, not a laptop, printer, and desktop?).

For sure I think that this is a market where the individual and the enterprise will go through their expenditures and those that are fixed, and with a big enough number next to them, will be asked to re-quote, re-justify, "get out or get real". How?

Creating Real New Value That Matters To People?

Umair gives an example of how Starbucks selling music and mouse mats is a classic example of selling product into adjacent segments (I'd argue that its a case of not knowing if its a product pusher/ service provider/ or meeting platform, but that's for another day). More importantly he points out that Starbucks has to become meaningful (again). The 'leap' Umair makes is that "being meaningful" has a social basis, in that it is a social meaning. We do not become socially meaningful  by "pushing crap" on customers.

I think it is probably a dangerous game to "tell customers"(sic) what is "meaningful" to them ("here have a freetrade coffee"), or even ("here, meet Paul, your overpriced coffee paid for his school"). I think it is going to involve

(1) extreme customer empowerment to define how, when and where they wish to interact with you;

(2) total customisation of the offer/product/service in a genuine atmosphere of co-creation;

(3) network orchestration not network ownership (by this I mean "be the go-to-guy", not the guy who said "we don't have it today, but we will have it tomorrow. The go-to-guy delivers you the solution, no matter who has supplied it, even a competitor).

Crunch Crunch Pixel by Pixel

Small Business

Via Greg at ScreenWerk an Amex survey in Oct 2008 shows that many small to medium sized businesses are now seeing a downturn in sales, and nearly 18% have real fears that they will go out of business. It also shows that nearly 40% of them will be late or unable to pay some bills. That's a lot of outstanding cash, and is sure to put even more pressure on cash flow. With this general lowering of the cash-level, we would normally expect the small business to go to their bank and ask for a little latitude, or overdraft. But I don't think we are going to see this happen in the next 12 months. Given that VoiceSage is in the business of helping you bring in your cash twice as fast you might expect me to plug that right now, but I am not going to (oops I just did). The real question here is putting predictability on your cash flow from all possible viewpoints. It is not enough to just sell, you have to "sell well", i.e. know how likely or not someone is to repay you. You then also have to collect well, and by that we mean be pro-active in your collections process.

Data and All It Can Do:

I love it when a service comes out and I go "now that makes sense, that's how people really think": Another HT to Greg Sterling : Homethinking matches a neighbourhood you know, with like neighbourhoods elsewhere. Doesn't this make a lot of sense? Isn't this what we want?; somewhere we understand and know as a baseline compared to a place we don't know that well. Truly excellent idea.

Customer Service: Call Transfer and Click to Call

Don't blind transfer calls. Just don't.  Managing click-to-call with better call whispering is something that you might also look at. To see a quick example check out the VoiceSage contact page. Thomas Howe has a short piece on how he misunderstood the power of click-to-call. Some follow up points here on why it might be good for finding keywords as well such as screening inbound calls  and gathering details prior to a call. Click-to-call needs a thorough overhaul and I for one am going to request a re-naming: how about "Click-To-Action"? All for that, vote eye (in your best pirates voice).

CrowdSourcing & Price Setting

Robin over at Bytesurgery is a neat example in progress of Crowdsourcing around the development of an entire application. Robin frequently shouts out via twitter and his blog to get feedback on everything from good names for products, to suggestions as to how his pricing model might be constructed. I happen to know that Robin spends a lot of time speaking with the real end users of his new product as well (Decisionsforheroes) but how he taps the community of web talent is pretty inspiring. And speaking of heroes, Sabrina Dent, well known and highly successful web designer, is also an expert in tapping the power of the social Internet. When she recently fell ill, she was able to "lay off"/ "outsource" a few projects to people she had trusted online relationships with.

(disclaimer: Sabrina did a rapid re-design of the VoiceSage website recently).

Eh, so what's so interesting about that Paul? Companies are not islands, they are networks, and the extent to which they are able to create collaborative, co-creating relationships, the more sustainable they will be. As analysts and planners we are often asked to challenge the assumptions but what better way to challenge them than to "publish them" and subject them to experiment? Crowdsourcing may not be good for all types of problems, in all types of situations, but it has certainly thrown open some interesting perspectives for Robin and his crew.

Ease of Use: The Data, The Presentation, The Influence.

Presenting The Data

Sometimes you see a thing or remarkable simplicity and you have to share it. The New York Times has an application that enables you to input some basic data regarding house price and rent movements and then create a visual presentation of what this means in terms of value creation or destruction for you. The pretty picture above shows a market with 5% growth in house prices and a 3% growth in rental income. In this scenario it makes sense to invest in a house. But change that house price appreciation to anything less than 3.5% and have a look at what happens. With Credit Today showing a 30 year low in UK house sales, you have to think that renting is going to become relatively more attractive, doubly so when the Irish Times reports today that there is 10% more rental stock coming on the market because houses are so difficult to sell.

Yahoo have a nice site showing a Politics Dashboard with up to date information on how each candidate is doing. What I like about this, besides from the big bold percentage numbers, is that the dashboard also presents "prediction markets" assessments.

I think some smart little company is going to come out of the woodwork with a neat way of building and linking these kinds of dashboards.

Research Happenings

Randy Saunders over at The Perfect Customer Experience blog has a nice reference to a recent Forrester Report on the fact that customers still want to speak to a live agent, and that they have certain expectations as to how well this process will be handled.

McKinsey Quarterly have a piece on Multi-Channel Marketing with a spin on Social Media: worth a read, particularly on the "fallacy of the final click". All customers move through many stages in their buying decision making cycle and both online and offline media often intermingle in their effects. We don't buy "entirely online" or "entirely offline".

Finally ! Social Media is Going To Be Of Some Value To Credit and Collections Professionals

Yes, a catchy title, not ! But the same McKinsey Study mentioned above quotes a very interesting use of social network analysis (SNA).

McKinsey research on telephone users’ social networks suggests that even they can be measured to allocate marketing budgets more successfully. One telecom company, for example, has learned how to retain phone customers by assessing the strength of the relationships among them. The company used call patterns, changes in call volumes, types of payment (prepaid or contract), handset types, and other traits to identify customers likely to leave for another carrier. Meanwhile, it constructed a diagram of their social ties, derived from the people they called, the people those people called, and how often. In general, the more closely anyone was tied to someone who unsubscribed, the more likely that person was to unsubscribe in turn. In this way, the telecom company improved its churn prediction model by 50 percent. Moreover, by identifying the most influential potential churners and working to retain them with new services and price plans, the company not only retained a quarter of them but also reduced the churn rate within their social networks by almost 40 percent.

I think that if you were buying a house, or voting for a candidate you too are likely to be influenced by someone close to you, probably someone on your social network. By giving people easy to understand, easy to share data, you could probably "turn-on" your influential customers

Enterprise Micro-Media

It's The Enterprise, Stupid

Great article on RRW on Twitter in The Enterprise, at BestBuy. What I take away from this:

• Short messaging is powerful and many will send and consume "micro-social content" while on the move; everyone understands texts.
• Social media will be made or consumed "around work", during breaks, before or after shifts; it may be made during "idle time".
• They are using "short codes" so people can text in ideas, responses, etc. Good idea me-thinks. Of course deploying short codes is an issue, especially in the USA.
• BestBuy initially went light on integration, but lingered on issues around authentication before considering deeper integration issues. If you are who you say you are, you tend to be a bit more careful though, so this one needs balance.
• People don't want to manage "multiple identities in multiple streams", i.e. Twitter, Jaiku, Yammer, etc. etc. Perhaps indicating the future fluidity between personal identity and work life identity. After all, someone only has to Google you to find out about you. That's why they are building "containers" within which conversations occur. Some containers will be open, some will be restricted. This is where Jaiku really messed up with not moving forward fast enough.
• Location awareness is something that they will be looking at, mostly because you want to see the people that are around you and near you for some types of questions. Watch this one go crazy as location awareness is embedded in the browser, and the browser goes to the phone (Firefox, and Chrome). Then watch it go mad when RFID hits it. 
• Trust is an issue when you begin to use social media, because you may not know who these people are, even within your own company. So you have to figure out how to provide social validation to get things started.
• Initiation and Consumption: BestBuy bought in the solution that worked best in Outlook because that's where all their employees live. Think about that. Now think about the price of MSFT stock. Early adopters may be all "net centric" but the majority of people live in Outlook, IE, and their phone.

Example of Enterprise 2.0 Communications Mashup?

A lot of these issues ring true to me. At VoiceSage one of the things that we have (behind the scenes) is the ability to deploy inbound SMS-codes, and also outbound SMS a part of a flow. We had a client that was a large university that posted different Short Codes in Printed Media and in Outdoor advertising with the advice to text the word "study" to the short code number. VoiceSage would then ring them, ask them a few qualification questions, and then patch them through to the appropriate knowledgeable staff member. Neat use of a call flow I think. And one that the client came up with, not us.

Between the Two, Governed and Ungoverned Mashups?

I am sure that in-store staff could come up with some pretty neat promotions if they could create and deploy them within some kind of overall policy. But that's not exactly "in the spirit" of the BestBuy story above. I think the spirit of the BestBuy story is more in the lines of increasing the information flow, releasing some control of its granularity, and opening up the enterprise to the power of weak-linkages. In this respect VoiceSage is more the "governed mashup" to the "ungoverned mashup" of Twitter et al.

The Nature of Credit & Trust

Credit is Social

Rob Paterson over on the FastForward Blog has a deep insight to share about the very nature of credit. In an industry that sees credit as an empirical, deeply-scorable entity, it is easy to forget that fundamentally, it is a social object. By this we mean that it derives its value from the social contract, driven by our fundamental belief that this person will pay it back, and not by any insight into our belief that they can or have the ability, to pay it back.

Mr. Hempton over at Bronte Capital (HT Mr. Kinsella) has a related point that its not a shortage of cash that is creating a credit crunch but a shortage of Trust. I did some research on Trust a number of years ago and from what I can remember it had an awful lot to do with irreversible investments and historical behaviors patterns. There was a whole lot more buried in the depths of the theory such as the existence of relationship specific assets, but I wonder if at route, an awful lot of this current mess doesn't lie somewhere between losing the social context, and losing the relationship-specific assets.

Trust-Thee The Cloud?

Some fairly big announcements this week around "cloud computing". The issue of how open or not the cloud was going to be was a talking point, and then Amazon goes and says he, we're like, Windows-Centric, and why not use BEA webserver, to like, totally port your application to the Amazon cloud? I think we are seeing a traditional bridging strategy here: don't abandon your old installed infrastructure, but if you need to build anything new into it, why not build it or buy it from the cloud? And now, with no improved windows-cloud, it will scale too :)

The Semi-Permeable Physical Digital Membrane

Cisco released a study that revealed "Reveals Consumers Trust Online Payment Providers More Than Traditional Banks". eh hum. Big throat clear. By facilitating connected commerce around the point of sale, financial institutions can become more influential, by connecting payments, merchants, and other "data" (one presumes). What it boiled down to is that if you get more "connected digital experiences" within the store (i.e. search - compare activity) then the opportunity arises to disintermediate the banks. After all, if I have a paypal account and so does the store, why not just pay through that? I actually do believe that digital technology and social media will play a much more prominent role in everybody's purchasing behavior, but I think we all may have to re-think what it is a financial institution does, and the role it plays in society, before it becomes truly possible for them to grasp this connected opportunity. Companies like Google "get this" and build "edge competencies" that lead them to become "market co-coordinators" or indeed, market platforms (For more on this topic I can recommend Sean over at The Park Paradigm and The 6th Paradigm ). John Hagel has more on edge economics here.

What would it take for banks and other financial institutions to develop Edge Competencies? I don't know, but I suspect it isn't in their DNA to do anyway.

Browser, Clients, Credit and 2.0

Enterprise2.0 & Office2.0, Clients and Browsers

Phil Wainewright has a truly excellent piece on the use of mashup's on RightNow Technologies. Some of the points I am fascinated with is Phil's contention that in many situations "browser only/ no download" culture of Office2.0 may not actually deliver benefit, and that there remains a role for the lightweight client.

Credit and Collections in The News

The Wall Street Journal reports that credit and collections is now a front and center concern for all US banks. They are focusing on getting in front of customers as soon as their is any indication that they may be struggling; making more offers around helping construct partial payment and late payment plans; and they are using these interactions and incentives to help "renegotiated the debt relationship" they have with the client (i.e. reduce limits, introduce new terms etc.) Interestingly, they are also investing in self service solutions where customers that find themselves in a "bit of trouble", can develop and deploy their own late payment plan entirely on their own and without having to speak to the agent or collections agency.

Oh, and $969bn is the amount on rotating credit, ie outanding on credit cards. Gee, its sounds a lot when you say it like that.

Getting All 2.0 On Your Credit

Another service called BillShrink is also trying to help customers manage their credit card debt (VentureBeat). What I love about this is that the service makes obvious what other benefits might be (i.e. air miles, fees, etc.). It asks you a few simple questions around what your spending is like, and how much your credit limit is, and then gets to making some suggestions.

I sincerely believe that there are opportunities to more accurately asses the true nature of a persons payment risk through higher levels of data granularity; using data from different data pools, and ideas lifted from the world of social media.

To return to the question of "how you spend your money will impact your credit score": from what I remember if you buy groceries with your credit card, this is not good. The credit card company might make some high level assumptions about what this means. But wait.

Techcrunch reports on Expensify, a solution that is a credit card, that allows you to take a picture of your receipt, and file the whole thing. You can then print out your receipts by trip, in order, and attached with proof of payment (this is where I go, OMG, like a 13 year old). They take a 3% fee for doing this (woah.... what? but wait a minute, how much time would you spend doing your expenses, how late are you usually in handing them in, and what is your usual charge on that? yes, it does, it does add up). Of course the real beauty with Expensify is that they could be your "credit information broker", and unlike Billshrink they won't be asking you to guess, you just gave them permission to track your spend.

Human - Machine Interaction, When and Why.

A new report from Nortel and BT, "Fragvergence: Changing Consumer Attitudes to Diverse Contact Channels", has found that there is actually a good consumer reaction to getting an automated message, in the right context.

They ran both a quantitative survey of 1,018 on U.S. and U.K. consumers and a qualitative set of in-depth interviews with consumers (how many of those, they don't say in the release, and I am waiting on the full report).

- 71 percent of U.S. and U.K. consumers would be happy to receive a call that used voice recognition to inform them that their plane, train or bus would be late.

- 80 percent reported that they would look favorably on automated calls that informed them of the time of delivery of goods to their homes.

Gee, shock horror. VoiceSage is doing this day in day out for leading brand name companies in the UK right now, today.

The report goes on to say that the end user would be happy for the company to use Voice Recognition if it reduced cost, and of course this cost was passed on to the consumer. Really? Customers are interested in better service at lower cost? I must read on.

They point out that American's are much more likely to like automated IVR, for reasons that remain unexplored in the PR Release, but may, just may have something to do with other research which shows that the American public would rather talk to a machine than someone from the Philippines.

But the report does strike some interesting notes: for instance, many product decisions are now "de-facto" service decisions. When I buy a laptop I am comparing various technical specifications against my belief in the brand, and my expectations as to the probable level of service I will receive if/when something goes wrong. This is an excellent point that is somewhat lost in the overall release.

They also draw our attention to the finding that:

Customers appear to have stark preferences on which channels they wish to use for different services. For financial services, for instance, 56 percent of U.S. respondents and half of U.K. respondents welcomed voice recognition for checking their account balance. Only 12 percent and 13 percent respectively liked the idea of setting up the direct debit using IVR

Now there is a very simple "work around" to that and it is "don't expect completely new to the service customers to sign up on an automated system, but instead, connect them through to an excellent call center agent?" I can also let you in on another little secret, VoiceSage is helping companies (Telco's, Utilities, Financials) to use outbound Interactive Voice Messaging to collect payments every single day, and our customer satisfaction and feedback rates are very positive. 

In fairness Andrew Small, head of CRM capability, BT Global Services, says in the statement "Our research showed that consumer preferences are both particular to the sector and also the application being used.” With this I would agree absolutely, and that is why you should do business with someone who understands that process.

E.2 Barriers To Adoption

 

Why Senior Management Invest In Enterprise 2.0

Here's a little conundrum: all project management and product development books will tell you top team sponsorship is essential for success. So why are all the Analysts saying that "enterprise 2.0 is under the radar", its "user generated", its wild-fire? Well, because that's what happened with Web2.0 Retail. Companies that spent a fortune gaining first position in their vertical were overcome by new 2.0 players, often within a 12-18 month time frame. (see UK real estate players for examples). But me-thinks Enterprise is a bit different.

Bill Ives on The FastForwardBlog says there are four business reasons for adopting enterprise 2.0 that got senior execs excited.

1. As company grew there was an increasing need to collaborate across time zones. This became apparent as they made more acquisitions and at first, had difficulty just going across one time zone. The enterprise 2.0 tools addressed this issue.

2. When they were a regional bank, the bank found that company events (picnics) and activities (softball league) helped build commitment. Now they saw the need to build a similar sense of community and commitment on a global basis with the new enterprise 2.0 tools.

3. Like many companies they have maturing workforce and were concerned with the lose of knowledge. Now with enterprise 2.0 tools they are capturing knowledge in the process of work through wikis, blogs, and similar means.

4. They saw the need to engage generation y workers. This caught imagination of senior executives when their research showed that generation y workers come with greater engagement but within a year they dropped to below average on engagement because there were no tools for engagement. The new employees were also driven down by the hierarchy. Enterprise 2.0 tools provide the means of engagement with tools they are used to using that allow for participation

So, Senior Management are concerned about Motivating and Retaining their young talent; they want to try to capture tacit knowledge, routines, and relationships; they want to build team spirit and feeling of "company belonging"; and they wanted to enable people to find others in their company, even across timezones. So far, so 1987.

More on The Adoption of Enterprise2.0 From Office 2.0

The Office2.0 Conference guys noticed 5 categories of barriers:

(1) Culture: resistance to change, resistance to new tools, familiarity with current environment, lack of rewards

(2) Awareness: lack of awareness of what the tools are. At client site, I was talking about twitter and a business problem we were working on, and using twitter to get some ideas. For the client, the firewall prevented them from using it. Most people know about LinkedIn and Facebook, but there is a lack of awareness beyond that.

(3) Technology: concerns about privacy, security, protection, particularly in financial services. Hospital argument — spend money in case someone might die. Same thing with security

(4) Security: privacy protection, etc.

(5) Generational differences: if the organization doesn’t have a lot of younger workers, there seems to be no acceptance. Many companies are not worried about the younger generation.

So again, Culture, Reward Structures for Desired Behaviors, Clear understanding of Security and Governance, i.e. who is in charge, and who is responsible for the implementation and its deliverables. Gosh, I sound so old school here.

Getting Over The Barriers

(1) Get upper management to use tools themselves

(2) Show use one small tool to solve one problem (reduce complexity and make benefit clear).

(3) Build on successes.  Let others see that their peers are having success and they will want to follow suit.

(4) Build group and let others see that others are using IT—peers using it

(5) Use new system in parallel with traditional collaboration processes so they can see the benefits Ex: email vs banned email

(6) Build support processes at the same time as introducing the new tool (remember individuals can change tools, but the organization changes very slowly).

(7) Build/engage culture where it's ok to experiment/take risks

(8) "Social media policy' you represent the company so 'be an adult'

(9) Use summer interns to bring in new technologies.  Are you a “stock” or a “Bond” (or maybe an “option”)- let someone else take the risk

(10) Kill the old systems so the new system is the only option

(11) Provide “guide on the side” training environment. Staff the role of community manager with the right person to engage others and teach others and manage content to get networking site going

(12) Start by addressing a business problem, not just bring in the tool.  When the business problem has been successfully addressed, then collaboration can be seen as a nice 'byproduct' of the solution.

From where I stand, this makes a lot of sense. And from where I stand if you had a plan to implement a "2.0" strategy and had a 12 step plan to overcome barriers to adoption, and you had worked out a clear business case for using it, well, you probably wouldn't have to use the phrase "2.0" at all.:)

Update: Dion has a massive post on getting 2.0 into the enterpise. It takes a different tack to the "traditional approach", and its well worth the read. Dion's take (IMHO) is that you need to "break the china" and go big with the big commitment to 2.0.

Big Theme, Little Theme

Big Theme: Serendipity, Patterns of Interaction, Culture.

When John Hagel speaks, I listen. Today he posted about "The Big Sort" and "The Difference", and the role of cultural diversity in creating "productive friction", which in turn enables long term innovation. While many theorist have pointed out that the urban flows (of traffic, of housing, and retail / commercial districts) set up a little "social tube" that we move around without really reflecting on it, I think not enough attention has been paid to "interaction styles" and culture. We can all pass each other in the street and say "good day, nice weather, I hope it holds", God knows, in Ireland the weather is always an occasion for conversation. But its a known pattern that isn't deviated from often. I am sure that just as many "known patterns of interaction" take part every day when a sales person is speaking with a customer, or a customer care agent is dealing with a call. The "formula" enables you to get through the interaction predictably and without offence. But it doesn't create the opportunity for insight. It doesn't help you understand "what else is going on around here" that could be influencing this interaction.

Little Theme :) Cumulative Benefits

Companies are now starting up to compete with SpinVox and the heavily funded Speech to Text product companies. Speech to Text means that you can dial a number, say what you want to do, or say a message, and have it delivered to a number of media or modes (i.e. email, SMS, etc.). VentureBeat reports on MessageSling which allows you to send a message to a group in any mode on any network. The article points out that you can do any network messaging on from SpinVox through uReach. I can also point out that www.dial2do.com has a speech to text engine. Yesterday ReadWriteWeb had a piece on using the iPhone as a satnav type offering. The opportunity to create applications and services that are a mix and match, a mashup, of various other platforms can often be a problem too, inthat the start up hasn't really thought about cumulative "lock in's" that discourage the user from leaving for another service.

Getting With The Big Themes: SaaS and Media Consumption

TechCrunch carried the piece that Joost would move to entirely browser based delivery. The even bigger news was that the social consumption aspect of the service would now be much more prominent. I always thought that joost should be the "virtual couch" where you and your friends could watch TV, Media, Games, and then just comment, show other related clips etc. You could say to your friends "hey, wanna watch CSI tonight at 10.00?". Others say that Joost just didn't have the compelling content it needed to draw users in. I learned a lot from my trial of the spotify.com alpha service. It has great player, loads of content, clean interface. What I missed about my lastfm was serendipity. And that is what John Hagel was talking about.

Appointments 2.0: A specific instance of "micro-process" drags.

Kristen Nicole at Mashable brings us news that HeyCosmo brings the world a service that uses the phone to help schedule your life.  You could use the Concierge service to phone the HeyCosmo number and ask it to phone all the restaurants in a particular area and see if they have a table for 7pm. One presumes that who ever picks up the phone and confirms that they have a table will then be connected back to you.. It sounds nice but you will never ever use this service unless it is connected to an accurate and useful store of directory assets, or social network ratings, etc. I must admit Ijust don't see these guys being architected to do this. HeyCosmo reportedly has plans to expand into a kind of referral based service based on Geo-location/ local data. With 11 staff and Silicon Valley based, it can't be a cheap start up either.

Update: RWW thinks HeyCosmo needs more emphasis on the receiver's experience. Bang On Assessment in my view.

Presdo (as in "press-do") are another 2.0 start up that enable you to invite people to events "on the fly". Drag a link to your toolbar and start booking events with friends and colleagues. This service is email driven and very "gooleicious". Which leads me to Google Calendar. Use Gmail and Calendar, hey even stick an SMS reminder into the routine, and your good to go. And with Google Gears for Calendar about to debut you have even more reason to use it.

TimeBridge on the other hand have a brief "negotiation" capability in that the initiator can choose 5 potential meeting times, and the recipients choose "best, available, not good" for each of the times, and then an email negotiation is entered into. It also synchs with  all the available calendaring softwares. The key pieces here are "installed software base", and "negotiation". If the negotiating service was also "aware" of some of your meeting habits, relationship strengths, and work priorities, then it might actually become effective. These are key "micro-process" drags based on problems of co-ordination and communication.

Phil Wolff of SkypeJournal totally nailed it this week with this posting.

While the diagram above is an obvious reference to Alex Saunders "Presence 2.0" it illustrates how much deeper the conversation has to go to actually solve something as "simple" as an appointment routine. If you think of an appointment setting in your outlook as an "object", you may wish to see notes on the conference call, attached to-do's, products referenced in the call, etc. As your organisation scales in number, and the number of interactions / appointments between you and the customer scale, the issue becomes non-trivial.

Imagine: you have an appointment with an installer from BT, who said they would be at your house by 10.30. Why not go to the calendar page he emailed you as part of the confirmation cycle, hover over it, and it shows you on a map, where he is right now, and how long it will take to "next appointment"? Think of it as a FexEx for Everybody in your always live calendar. There is a opportunity to solve a real problem here, but we're all a bit away from having the social and technical infrastructure in place to crack it on a large scale. (IMHO)

Batch and Weave

Micro-Processes , Structural Processes, and Shorter  Product Development Times

The theme is well understood at this point: those that can sense and respond to market needs and demands, and can iterate their products, designs, features etc. faster than the competition, eventually "out evolve" them. I saw this years ago in Japanese manufacturing strategy called lean production.

A key part of this "lean" was the ability to turn production processes away from "long lines" to "flexible cells". Then, within each cell there was (usually) a key machine that had a "set up & turnaround time". This was a key constraint. But here is something you probably didn't know: operators of these machines kept very detailed log books of how the machine operated in reality, and issues that effected its performance. We are talking a "log book on a string" here. These books would provide details of real "constraints" in the production process so designers could see that their design changes would have key impacts on the production line. Underpinning the systems thinking here, was a clear culture that understood the upstream and downstream impacts of their performance and failures. Micro-processes (Machine Set Up Constraint) fit seamlessly into Macro-Processes (Product Development Process).

For all the talk about Lean Production & Agile Enterprise we still don't seem to be doing a great job of this in the last 20 years. What strikes me here, again, is that there are many Micro-Processes that an individual can capture, and these will matter in themselves to the individual capturing them, and in aggregate to those involved in strategy, finance and marketing. This is one theme of the Enterprise 2.0 debate that isn't really being brought forward enough.

CEBP (communications enabled business processes) are one way of unlocking some of those key constraints, but perhaps there are very many other opportunities to capture and share micro-processes. I am sure that a lot more could and will be done with CEBP and internal organisational efficiencies.

 Costs and How To Curtail Them

Denis Howlett has a posting on how to look at costs a bit more closely: a lot of smaller companies don't have a formal review process for this, but just by asking existing service providers to re-tender you can regularly attain decent cost savings. Denis does recommend that companies also look to see how they can refocus from offline to online marketing. At VoiceSage we attend quite a few conferences but we also do quite a bit of our work through "teleweb". Of course a core part of what we do around here is help companies bring in their outstanding debtor days/ sales days outstanding by using Interactive Voice Messaging (IVM). One of our Clients is a Catalogue company called Otto, and it brought in its money twice as fast using VoiceSage. But there are add on points to this: we know that companies can reduce their outstanding debt by Communications Enabling the Credit and Collections cycle. But have you traced all the upstream and downstream benefits of being more in control of this process?

 Telco2 Themes: The Continued Importance of CEBP

The guys at Telco2 continue to show the way in terms of what is possible for all parties in the new CEBP marketplace. looks like another good line up for the November Brainstorm. Let me throw a theme into the hat: "What enables you to create a platform of availability"?

Follow Up On Last Post: micro-processes

Are Conversations The Missing Piece Around Micro-Processes?

The ever excellent PersonalInfocloud comes forward with some interesting comments around Enterprise 2.0 and why it might be a bit different from Web 2.0. The bits that particularly caught my attention were that many of the micro-processes (my term) were not captured in an organisation, and information around even well defined processes were also not caught and captured and thus saved to "organisation memory".

Enterprise has gone through its phases of knowledge management tools, from forms for capturing information, forums for sharing, and up to enterprise content management systems (ECM) that encompass document management, content management, knowledge management, and information harvesting. But, the gaps still exist.

These existing gaps are around conversations not being captured (the walls of the halls have no memory (well today they do not)) and increasingly the ubiquitous communication channel in organizations, e-mail, is being worked around. Quick decisions are not being documented as it is not enough for a document or worth completing a form. As the iterative processes of development, design, and solution engineering are happening at quicker and smaller increments the intelligence behind the decisions is not being captured or shared. This is largely because of the tools.

How Would You Get Those Micro-Processes Out of Company?

TechCrunch reports on Worklight, a server based application that sits behind the firewall of the corporate and then enables corporate information to be "widge-fied" a la iGoogle. So, you see you're stock levels, your delivery times, etc. etc. I think this is a great idea and just know that this is the way all corporate interactions will move, both for internal employees, and for company customer interactions. The only "vision thing" I would ponder is shouldn't the server be hosted somewhere?

That Sounds Cool: Could We Do This On Some Web2.0 Stuff?

For those of you thinking that "our product would really sell well into large corporate users", beware. Its a serious commitment as a sales and marketing strategy, and needs good capitalisation. Ed Sims has more here.  In a related point Tom Evslin asks can you have a strategy for a start up if there is no revenue plan? Yes, you can, if you have a lot of personal money, a low personal burn rate, and the frame of mind to do it :) For those who are used to selling into large enterprises, expect "higher than web2.0 rates of friction".