Collaboration Cast

This email recently went out to Jive Employees:

As Jive finds it necessary to lay off 1/3 of its staff, Vignette welcomes the Jive team to check out our job postings and consider a career at a company that is investing, and will continue to invest, in a long-term Social strategy.

Vignette is financially strong and can weather these difficult economic times.  We are based in Austin, Texas one the best places to live in the United  States.

 In addition to our focus on social software, Vignette provides a comprehensive suite of web experience management products, which will give you a lot of opportunity to work with many technologies that are defining  the future of the web.

Let us know if you are interested.  We are always looking for top talent that is experienced in the social space.

Sincerely,

Dave Dutch

Sr. Vice President of Products and Marketing

Recently Bill Marriott in a MSNBC news interviewed called himself the blogger and chief of the Marriott hotel chain.  He told MSNBC that he writes all of his blogs on paper first before posting them. He also proudly boasted that his blog has helped his hotel chain generate over $4 million in hotel bookings.  Bill has set the bar for other companies who are looking to blog.

As Marriott has proven, a Blog can help a company generate sales and for a $4 million return a Chief Executive Blogger dedicated to blogging initiatives may prove a great return-in-investment.  Out of the Fortune 500 companies, 60 companies are taking blogs seriously.  This number has tripled from two years ago.

Some of these companies include:

Coca Cola
Dell
Southwest Airlines 
Kodak 

As Marriott has done, companies should start thinking about blogging and how to drive and track revenues from this new channel of conversation and customer engagement.

Should your business blog or not blog? Is blogging just a fad and when will it go away. IDC predicts that user generated content will grow to become the dominant type of content in the digital universe, with more than 70% of the content being user generated. The numbers prove IDC’s forecast, in 2007 Technorati published a blog citing the growth of blogs. Some of the highlights include:

Blogging is more than a trend, companies need to learn how to blog. Customers want to hear from companies. Business Week published some of the benefits blogging can provide companies:

1. Blogs are a great way to introduce new products and services to visitors without recoding.
2. Blogs are a great way to generate repeat traffic – pure gold.
3. Blogs tell you what customers like and don’t like – first-hand market research.
4. A blog is a great way to keep product reviews in front of your buyers.
5. A blog entry can be easily syndicated to other sites – all pointing back to your site.
6. A blog is easy to set up, easy to maintain.
7. Search engines love blogs. Tips for gaining traffic are included in our article “SEO Your Blog“.
8. A blog keeps your site fresh.
9. A blog has become part of visitors’ expectations.
10. A blog is lots of fun.

For those that want to get started, I recently read Chris Brogan’s article on 50 Steps to Establishing a Consistent Social Media Practice.

I thought he gave some great tips that could be applied for companies who want to start their own blogs. Here are some of the points I found most useful from his blog:

1. If you’re blogging, make that a home base for all your other efforts.
2. Pick 3 social networks to join based on where your customers might be. 3 might sound like too few, but it probably will be too many.
3. On those networks and on your “passport” accounts, make sure you link everything back to the blog.
4. Get a second (maybe even a 3rd) person in the company to build accounts on these places. Nice to have backups, in case you get busy.
5. Build an editorial calendar to think about your posting schedule and subject matter.
6. Subscribe to 50 or more blogs in a similar space as yours, including competitors, and any industry blogs.
7. On all your presence points, be human, and write a human-sounding profile. Use a human-seeming profile picture. (Did I mention “human?”)
8. After you’ve written your first blog post, take some time to comment on some of those 50 blogs, but NOT about your first post.
9. Make sure it’s easy for people to subscribe to your blog, via a reader and also via email.
10. Run periodic checks of your blog/site using Website Grader to see if you’re technically sound and findable.
11. Use tagging and other metadata to improve your blog’s search features. Most newer blog software has this built in. If not, look for plugins.
12. For whatever reason, graphics in posts improve audience. Check out Flickr’s Creative Commons pool for how to use which kinds of graphics appropriately.
13. Consider a nice clean theme for your blog’s design. There are many free themes for different blogs, and some inexpensive ones like Thesis that are worth every penny.
14. Outside of your blog, be sure to update/refresh the information on your social networks every two or three weeks. USE the networks more often, but refresh your profiles and other info.
15. Seek out opportunities to guest post on more popular blogs in your space. Don’t be spammy and over-link to your own site/posts. Add value.
16. On social networks, look for ways to contribute, even when it’s not directly related to your company/product.
17. Continue building relationships outside of having a specific need. Don’t ONLY try to build relationships with customers, for example.
18. To create consistent content, read daily, and not just for your industry. Skim, synthesize, and post.
19. Use notepad files to jot post ideas down when you don’t have a moment to write. Return frequently.
20. Riff off other blog posts you like, and add some value beyond linking back to those original posts (and always link back to those posts).
21. Go to the grocery store news stand and find popular magazines. Convert their story titles to blog post titles for your field.
22. Skim news aggregator sites like Reddit or Digg (or what’s appropriate to your industry), and create posts from there.
23. Ask your audience what they need, what they’re struggling with.
24. Revisit a month of posts and see what you’ve covered the least.
25. Think about things your customers/stakeholders/prospects might need and write about that, even if it’s a bit off-topic.
26. Check your stats to see what people are searching for, and address it.
27. Branch out your blogging into video and audio where appropriate.
28. Look into building a community platform around your content platform.
29. Invite your audience in to guest post where appropriate.
30. Add social bookmarking plugins like Add This to your blog to improve distribution.
31. Look for cross-promotional opportunities for like-minded blogs in your space.
32. Consider starting groups on your social networks (such as a Facebook group) to further discuss the space you’re covering.
33. Remember to comment on other people’s blogs frequently, and show your participation in the communities where you have presence.
34. Occasionally produce PDF versions of your better posts and email them to customers and prospects to encourage growing your audience.
35. Consider a conversion engine like a free offer to help sort prospects from fans and audience.
36. Move towards measurements quickly, as these are often where companies decide their vote.
37. Create a simple report on how you will report what you’re doing for upper management.
38. Work out which numbers might matter. Comments received. Links in. Times bookmarked?
39. Rank each blog post on effectiveness based on your own criteria. Review weekly and monthly.
40. Figure out a “downstream” metric that drives real business value. Reduce costs to call center? Sales leads?
41. Never count # of friends or # of followers as a valuable metric. It’s quality in that case.
42. As soon as you can, find ways to tie your numbers to marketing and sales numbers where appropriate.
43. Move to automate the numbers collection parts early. Keep the sentiment reporting parts human.
44. Set 3 month goals to review progress with upper management. Determine if this is having any impact.
45. Though these last 10 tips are about numbers, NEVER treat people like numbers in social media.

A simple search can provide you with several success stories of niche blogs. One of those is the story of Ken Savage who was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes and in a effort two learn more about the disease he started a blog called BattleDiabetes.com.

BattleDiabetes.com attracts over 7,000 to 9,000 pageviews on a given day and brought in almost $40,000 a year in supplemental income from online advertisement.

If Ken can do it, why can’t your company start blogging and benefiting from this new social media channel? Just Blog!

Most of you are already familiar with the explosive reaction that you get by adding both Mentos and Diet Coke.  For those that are no, you should take a look at the video below:

In the summer of 2006, entertainment site eepybird.com released a video showing what happens when Mendos candies react with Diet Coke.  The resulting “geyser” video spread virally, gerating thousands of views each hour and passing the 3 million mark within a few months and to date the video has been viewed 6,835,462 times.

Since the release of the first video, Mentos was quick to capitalise on this publiscity and shipped eepybird free cases of Mentos for further experimentation.  Also, they sponsored the “Make Your Own Mentos Geyser” competitions.  Which also created additional viral spread of videos and today in YouTube over 1790 mentos and diet coke videos exist.

In 2006, Mentos sales went up 20% - the highest increase in the company’s history. Mentos is a good example of a company who immediately reacted positively to an opportunity to gain free publicity and leveraged the publicity to not only help create more publicity, but also drive to record sales.

I believe the take home lesson for marketers is that we always have to be listening and staying attentive to how people are using and marketing our brands.  By listening and observing we may be able to catch a trend that will allow us to get free publicity and sales.  Mentos was listening and capitalized, why shouldn’t you do the same?

The pace of technology innovation has outpaced IT’s ability to deliver what their customers expect.  Recent surveys by Gartner, Forrester, and McKinsey clearly show how business users are favoring technologies that do not depend on IT. A recent survey conducted by Gartner shows that 30% of users are unhappy with the slow rate of IT change at their companies and this number is suppose to climb to 50% by 2013.

Forrester surveyed marketing managers and 70% of marketing managers were unhappy with their IT departments and preferred to rely on a marketing service provider or consulting organization to help them build and manage their systems.

IT’s lack of resources and ability to adapt to change and to new technologies is also captured in the growth of SAAS deployments over the next few years.  Recent research by Gartner shows how customers spent $1.7 billion on content, social software, and collaboration SAAS based tools in 2007.  The number jumps to $3.6 billion by 2011.  That is a 25.9% growth rate.  It is also the same is the same for CRM, the SAAS CRM market has grown from $1 billion in 2007 to $2.4 by 2011.

Just in the social software market alone 80% of the vendors are SAAS or hosted.   On premise solution vendors cannot catch-up with the speed of change and have become the minority.

A study by McKinsey shows how CIO’s are adapting to meet their customers demands, and they are seriously considering different options.

In 2006, 38% of CIO’s considered adopting SaaS and today the number has jumped to 61%.IT departments will need to change to stay ahead.  SAAS is likely to be the next big trend for IT departments who are trying to cope with their overwhelming user needs.  In the end the customer will prevail.  They will do this with or without IT, and IT better change in order to continue to stay relevant.

The CRM market is doing very well. Last year software revenue totaled $8.1 billion, an increases of 23.1% over the previous year. The leading CRM vendors continued to lead with SAP being number one with 25.4% market share and Oracle coming in second with 16.3%. Two up and coming stars includes salesforce.com growing at 49.8% and Microsoft, growing at 88.6%.

As these vendors continue to grow they are already looking at adjacent markets, where they can continue to grow. One of these natural markets is social software. Marketing managers continually face pressure to justify their social software, community, and web spending.   Being able to show direct returns in sales tracked by a CRM will greatly add value to marketing managers and ensure additional future investments.

Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester Research gives some examples of existing CRM and social software integrations:

Leverage Software/SalesForce

Leverage Software is integrated with Salesforce.com - has been for 2 years. The integration is currently light, but will deepen.

SalesForce for Dell/Starbucks

SalesForce offers IdeaExchange, which powers Dell Ideastorm and My StarbucksIdeas. SalesForce is one of the first CRM software vendors that now offers a social software product.

Hivelive for Serena

Serena’s Mashup Exchange (powered by HiveLive) is an online customer community that is being integrated with lead/CRM systems. Specifically, HiveLive’s LiveConnect Community Platform is integrated with MarketBright’s lead management system and Salesforce.com.

Further integrations will for sure follow, and even possible acquisitions. The marriage between social software and CRM makes sense.

An example of such a proposed integration can be seen above.  In SalesForce a account executive can see the customer’s online profile and leverage the added information to help in the sales process.  Also, having acces to a customer’s social network may lead to new opportunties or similar relationships that can also help in the sales process.

Just recently, Sun Microsystems sponsored a collaborative environment for building and hosting social widgets that can run on Facebook apps, Meebo apps, OpenSocial apps, iPhone apps, Google Gadgets, embeddable widgets, and other social applications.

The difference of Zembly versus other widget platforms/sites is that you can post your widget on Zembly and allow other people to use it to create their own widgets.  Development is fairly easy and according to Sun, it only takes one line of code.

Vendors already using Zembly include:  Amazon Web Services, Dapper, Flickr, Google, Meebo, Twitter, Yahoo Developer Network, YouTube, Zillow.com, and Zvents.

The benefit for Sun is that its Solaris OS, Java, Glassfish application server, and MYSQL are being used.  Also, the SUN’s network.com cloud computing platform is in use.  Consequently, SUN gets a lot of marketing from all of this.

Volusio, an eCommerce vendor, announced that they have enabled their eCommerce customers to add their products as widgets to Facebook and Myspace for sale.  Facebook and Myspace users can now see a product on a friends page and quickly make a purchase.

This new functionality should now enable Facebook and Myspace’s 80 million unique visitors to not only socialize, but also make purchases.

Volusions’s extension of eCommerce is only the beginning, I am sure people will next add stores to Myspace and find viral ways to sell products through Facebook.   Also, I believe people will not only add products, but they will also find ways to sell Facebook or Myspace templates, friends, widgets, games, affiliate programs, and even advertising.

I wonder if social software users will eventually get paid for advertising or adding eCommerce widgets to a personal home page. It will be interesting to see how eCommerce vendors develop Facebook and Myspace’s eCommerce engine.

The future of eCommerce and social software looks very interesting and for sure we will be covering the social eCommerce space here at Collaboration Cast.

Today, Nokia announced that it will be acquiring Plazes, a social software company.  Plazes allows members to post their activites and location from a pc, mobile, phone, or sms.  I would call this multi-channle service a more advaced form of Twitter.  Plazes has become more popular in Europe.

 The goal is to make Plazes available to millions of Nokia customers.  I am sure the business case showed potential high dollars in advertisment and also cell phone charges. 

The power of a mobile social network will be the location connection.  Nokia expects over 400 million devices to be GPS enabled.  This will allow for location based advertisment, which becomes a very powerful tool for advertisers.

 Vodafone was the other company to recently acquire a social software company.  They acuaried ZYB, a Danish company. 

The market is hot and growing for social software.  As stated in my previous blog: The Future Market Opportunity for Mobile Social Networking, the mobile entertainment market is supposted to grow by 36% and recahc $80 billion by 2011.

It will be very interesting to see what social networks become dominant, like Facebook and Myspace on the mobile phones.

Recently I spoke to a large fortune 1000 customers who is planning on implementing forms into their enterprise wiki. The customer told me that even though they have an enterprise content management system, many departments have been using the wiki for adhoc content management. Now knowledge management wants to streamline the adhoc content publishing and add form capabilities to the wiki so that content owners can create similar wiki pages for specific content publishing projects.

An example would be a wiki page dedicated to product details. The wiki page should allow users to enter a product name, description, features, contact person, price, release date, latest version, etc…. These product wiki pages would get updated each time a product was released. The forms capability would provide consistency across products.

Adding form capabilities to the wiki brings a wiki one step closer to becoming a content management system. Next businesses will want workflow and improved media management capabilities. It will be interesting how content management vendors will react to wiki’s in the near future.  Could they be another disruptive technology for content management vendors? I think so.