the Web Chef's e-Bytes

Web Tidbits - IE and Internet Status

The Global Information Technology Report was released today.  The report prepared by INSEAD and sponsored by the World Economic Forum ranked the U.S. as fourth in Internet infrastructure following Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland.  China advanced in the rankings to 57th.  Other country rankings show up in their table "The Networked Readiness Table 2007 - 2008".  Ranking at the bottom of the list was Chad.  The Executive Summary of the report finds a world of growing interconnectivity with Less Developed Countries leapfrogging older technologies with the installation of WiMax. 

In other interesting statistics, Forrester Research reported a precipitous drop in Internet Explorer's market share with a drop of 11% in 2007 from 88.7% to 77.7% as Mozilla Firefox continued to gain share not only in the consumer market, but also in the enterprise market according to Information Week.  The article also reported that many companies had not migrated to IE7 sticking with the less robust IE6.

New Article in Wisconsin Technology Network - Big Brother is Watching

I've written a new article in the ongoing series of Buzz Network articles in Wisconsin Technology Network.  The article "Big Brother is Watching; Privacy Barriers are Falling Down" examines some of the recent government and industry intrusions into consumer privacy along with providing suggestions for ways that businesses can avoid problems with their customer's privacy. 

Web Tidbits - Miscellaneous

Sorry for not posting for awhile.  I'm ready to get back in the blogging saddle...

Here are a few web tidbits and sites for your pleasure and exploration.

Wiki of obsolete skills - A to Z contributions of skills we no longer need.  A - Adjusting rabbit ears on top of a tv, Z - zmodem to transfer a file.  Perusing the list brought back some memories like eight tracks, formatting a floppy or rewinding an audio-casette using a Bic pen.

BusinessWeek talks about the TED conference introduction of Kluster (beta), a social network for product invention and creation.  The concept is that through the "wisdom of crowds" ideas will be converted into protottypes and solutions.  Also referenced in the article is Inkling, a Chicago based company that is creating a "prediction market platform" for generating results from groups.

Meanwhile Information Week, showcases the start-up HiveLive, a Boulder based enterprise social networking vendor that markets LiveConnect "a user-configurable building block for networking with people and sharing information.  Hives can incorporate forums, polls, blogs, wikis, and more."

2008 trends continued

In the latest issue of McKinsey Quarterly, there was an article "Eight Business Technology Trends to Watch in 2008".  The trends that they reference in the article are the following:

1. distributing co-creation
2. using consumers as innovators
3. tapping into a world of talent
4. extracting value from interactions
5. expanding the frontiers of automation
6. unbundling production from delivery
7. putting more science into management
8. making businesses from information

For each of the trends they elaborate on what they mean and include concrete examples.  They also include references to 3 or 4 other sources that support each of the trends being reviewed.

For some trends that I feel will be part of the landscape in 2008, see my article "Five Fearless Technology Forecasts for 2008" in Wisconsin Technology Network.

On the Radio - On the Air with In Business 1.24.08

I'm being interviewed about the latest trends and developments in e-business and marketing by Joan Gillman and Jody Glynn Patrick, hosts of the popular nightly radio show "On the Air with In Business Magazine" on Madison, Wisconsin-based WTDY 1670 AM, the pulse.  The show will air on January 24, 2008 from 6:00 - 7:00 pm and can be heard live on the radio or online and will be available as a podcast following the broadcast.

Interestingly, one of my prior interviews is the most downloaded podcast of this ongoing show.

Give me a call (608) 255 4092 or e-mail me if you'd like me to speak to your group.

Paul J Gibler
the Web Chef
ConnectingDots

New Column in Wisconsin Technology Network - 5 Fearless Technology forecasts for 2008

I've written a new column in the ongoing series of Buzz Network columns for Wisconsin Technology Network.  The new column "5 fearless technology forecasts for 2008" looks at 5 key trends or forecasts that will be impacting e-business and marketing in 2008. 

1. Niches
2. Multi-channel content delivery
3. High design and hybrid technology enhancements
4. Web 2.0 implementation
5. Changing consumer behavior

Paul Gibler
the Web Chef
ConnectingDots

Bacn Management - e-mail infoglut management strategies

According to The Wall Street Journal, the Radicati Group reports that "the average corporate e-mail user received 126 messages a day, up 55% from 2003".  This infoglut is the result not only of continuing problems with spam, but with the growth of what is now being called "bacn" or "e-mail you want, but not right now". While spam filters, white lists, black lists, trusted senders and other tools have been and continue to make inroads against spam; "bacn" both from external and internal sources is clogging e-mail inboxes.  This infoglut is creating major headaches for recipients and corporations alike.  The importance of this problem is clear with The Wall Street Journal article stating "Email overload is now considered a much bigger workplace problem than traditional email spam."

Companies are approaching the "bacn" growth with a number of strategies.  According to a recent article in Computerworld, one strategy being pursued is the introduction of enterprise RSS feeds.  These RSS feeds, much like those consumers are latching on to, allow workers to subscribe or be subscribed to content feeds that are relevant or critical to their work.  This narrowcasting can reduce the infoglut of e-mail.  I know that when given a choice between e-mail and RSS, I'll subscribe to an RSS feed, however if it is what I call "crispy bacn" (mmmm, my favorite) or messages that I really want to see, I like to receive these via e-mail.  The reason for this is that I subscribe to so many feeds (I know a glutton for punishment) that it can often be weeks or days to get to the feeds that I'm less interested in.  Among the enterprise RSS feed companies that are referenced in the article are Attensa, KnowNow and NewsGator,

In a different strategy for e-mail infoglut management, The Wall Street Journal reports (subscription required) on the growth of start-ups that are helping users manage their e-mail by tagging, sorting or re-directing it to different users.  The sorting takes place based on algorithms rather than user supplied factors.  For ClearContext, one of the companies cited in the article they reportedly look at your inbox and the speed in which you normally respond to that sender to determine how to tag the e-mail content. Other companies that are referenced in this article are Seriosity and Xobni (inbox spelled backwards - cute!).

As a professional with a background in corporate and marketing communications, efforts to improve internal communications like these will prove popular and useful in improving team productivity.

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Need help with your internal communications strategies? 

Drop me an e-mail or give me a call (608) 255 4092, I'd be happy to work with you to develop strategies for your Intranet, RSS feeds, internal e-mail, wikis or other tools that could be of use for improving worker productivity.

Paul Gibler
the Web Chef

Consumer Behvior - Retail Showrooms, Online Purchases and the Rise of Disintermediation

The Internet Changes Everything! 

We heard this cry for a number of years since the launch of a commercial Internet over ten years ago. 

How true is this when it comes to purchases of big ticket items? 

Are consumers ditching the local, regional or big box retailer for purchases online through channel participants with lower costs and hence lower total prices for acquisition?  If this is the case, the brick and mortar retailers will increasingly become the "free showrooms" where consumers armed with online review information can go and check out the plasma or LCD HDTV they are coveting.  This process is what academics and others call disintermediation or cutting players out of the supply chain when making your purchase.

For example we're in the market for an HDTV this year.  Thanks to a generous retirement gift, my partner can select a television within a certain dollar range.

So what has the purchase process entailed so far?  Like many consumers the purchase follows a range of steps. 

Step 1 - Research HDTVs on Consumer Reports, CNET and through word-of-mouth discussions with current owners

Step 2 - With the selection narrowed down to plasma's in our case, the second step was to go to the regional and big box retail showrooms to see the models that seemed to meet our viewing and budget criteria.  In our market, this meant visits to the the big box stores, Best Buy and Circuit City, along with regional chain American TV. 

Step 3 - We wanted to hear what the sales people had to say about the televisions.  In and of itself this was interesting, given the range of performance, knowledge and selling styles that we encountered.  Our first stop was American TV, a company I've blogged about before.  The first sales rep we encountered there appeared to be knowledgeable telling us that the model we were looking for, a Panasonic Plasma 50, had been replaced by a newer one that they had available.  He knew that the Panasonic we came in to see was a Consumer Reports best buy, so appeared to know his stuff,  He wasn't pushy, condescending or difficult to talk to.  The second stop was Best Buy where we found a nice sales guy in home electronics, who said "let me turn you over to the expert sales person for plasma televisions".  He did so and the guy was very knowledgeable and was even willing to offer us a deal on the television we had decided on.  The television was the original one we had looked for at American TV.  Best Buy had both models and said they were both available, making us question the American TV sales rep's knowledge or "truthiness".  Next stop was a visit to Circuit City.  The store had a noticeable lack of customers compared to either of the other two stores we had visited.  (Maybe their firing of all their top earning sales people is having repercusions after all!)  We found ourselves wandering among the televisions trying to find the Panasonic model we now knew existed without any help.  For a potential puchase of almost $3,000, you'd think there'd be some attention.  We finally found a sales rep, who took us over to the television we were interested and said "here you go, I have to go do some other things" and left us there.  If we had wanted to make a purchase it would have been difficult.  The price was $100 more then the deal Best Buy was willing to give us.  The way the unit was displayed allowed us to compare it to a Hitachi, Toshiba and LG units that were next to it and below it.  This led us to feel confident that the model was a good one that had a more life like color rendition to that of the competitive offerings.  A good thing, since the unit has a price premium.  We decided to return to American TV to see if the model was there and if a different sales rep would take us to it.  We thought this could be a way to support a regional chain that had started in Madison, WI our hometown and had done pretty well for itself.  We ended up with a real jerk of a sales person, who proceeded to demean us by saying that Consumer Reports and CNET reviews are useless and that only audiophile publications are worth following.  He said that the Consumer Report reviews were biased because the reviewers got to keep the televisions at the end, a fact we know to be false given the number of years we've subscribed to Consumer Reports.  His style and approach were extremely off-putting and offensive.  If I had been a secret shopper, I'd have put him on notice with his management team. 

Step 4 - This step actually happened between store visits.  I went online to the Panasonic web site to find the specifications for the model we were considering.  The set was there and was available directly from Panasonic for their list price of $2999.  The specifications confirmed that the unit had the features we wanted and that it would fit in the new piece of furniture we were buying to house it (another shopping tale in itself).

Step 5 - Although the television is a gift and the final price was within the acceptable range, it was at the high end of the range and I wasn't convinced that Best Buy or Circuit City were offering anything more for the money then I could get by shopping online.  I proceeded to three of my favorite shopping comparison sites (PriceGrabber, Mysimon, Shopping) with the model name and number at hand to see what the online retailers had to offer.  Not too surprisingly I was able to find a range of prices for the television including significantly better prices from sites where we had previously made and been happy with big purchases - Buy.com and NewEgg.  The prices ranged from a low of $2209 to a high of $3200.  The Best Buy price would have been $2749, plus tax.  Some online prices included free shipping, some from the national online retailers with brick and mortar locations included the state sales tax.

Step 6 - The purchase decision.  This hasn't been made yet, but for the retail showrooms there is a big red flag, if their business model doesn'f offer some sort of advantage to the online retailers.  If all they are going to do is go to their warehouse load up the tv and drop it in our family room, why should we pay them more than for an online retailer that loads up the television in a remote warehouse, delivers it to our family room and leaves?  The brief conversation with the sales rep isn't enough of a value added differentiator to make the product purchase swing their way. 

My Recommendations
What the local, regional or big box brick and mortar retailers need to do to clench the sale is offer some sort of added incentive to swing the deal their way.  They could offer something like the following:

• Free in home service for a year
• Removal of your old television for free (you now pay for this in Madison)
• Installation for free
• Customer workshops - getting the most out of your HDTV, understanding the home theater
• Purchase from us, we'll donate $xxx to a local charity of your choice    

Needless to say, the process has been interesting and one that offers a lesson for both shopper and retailer as they think through the best ways to connect with their target market.

New Column in Wisconsin Technology Network - Widgets

I've written a new column in the monthly series of articles, Buzz Networks, recently published in Wisconsin Technology Network.  The article "Widgets - web components for plug, play and pay" reviews the evolving and expanding world of widgets or gadgets and the benefits they can provide companies looking to connect and distribute their messages widely. 

With Facebook, Microsoft and the major blog platforms endorsing these portable applications, they will only be growing in the future.

If you'd like me to come and speak to your group on the latest developments in e-marketing, I'd be happy to discuss your budget, needs and schedule.  Please contact me in the United States at 608 255 4092 or via e-mail.

Have a great Thanksgiving!

Paul J Gibler

Enterprise or Business Social Networks

Intro
Business or Enterprise Social Networks, much like consumer social networks, are growing rapidly and are available in a range of functionalities, sizes and shapes.  Among the options that are out there for business people and enterprises are the following:

• Cross-company business social networks - Ryze, LinkedIn, Spoke and newly launched IncBizNet "the networking community for small companies", etc.
• Business networks at consumer sites like Facebook
• Enterprise social networks or sub-sets of selected tools
• Branded communities for end customers

The interest in social networks by businesses is projected to grow as reported by Redmond Development News "according to a recent survey of 273 IT professionals by Forrester, 28 percent of enterprises with more than 500 employees say their enterprise has some form of social networking initiative, while 20 percent are considering it."

Meanwhile, IDC has broken down the emerging market into three segments according to WebProNews "These include: self-service applications used by groups and marketing campaign teams; brand applications that focus on persistent customer engagement; and enterprise applications that provide more effective ways of working with customers, partners and other external parties".  They project a growth in investment in these segments to $428.3 million by 2009, from $46.8 million in 2006.

So why the interest in business social networks?  According to CIO Insight, SelectMinds (one of the business social networking vendors), "claims users are seeing quantitative and qualitative results in terms of new business generation, productivity, retention and branding."

Social Networks Reviewed
Before we go into each of these social networking options, some of you may still be a bit confused about the social networking buzz.  Social networks are typically based on linking together individuals based on their interests and expertise.  They often revolve around individuals developing a profile and then identifying explicit and implicit connections according to Cerado, a business social networking specialist.  In an Executive Briefing (PDF) at their site they identify 10 ways businesses and associations can use social networks including the following:

1. Customer and Member relationship development
2. Customer support
3. Expert knowledge identification
4. Post-acquisition integration
5. Providing a whole product by linking related products and services
6. Understanding and visualizing organizational communication paths
7. Meeting facilitation and preparation
8. Extending meeting shelf lif
9. Sharing Knowledge
10. Pulling together appropriate team

To look at social networks in a more visual fashion, I found this video from The CommonCraft Show that provides a simple and easy to understand explanation of a consumer social network.  For corporate or enterprise social networks substitute jobs for clients and love for business relationships and you'll get the concept completely.

Public Social Networks
Cross-company public sites like Ryze, LinkedIn, Spoke and IncBizNet are gaining followers and supporters as business people follow the consumer sector in recognizing the potential benefits of social networks for business purposes including lead generation, recruitment, market intelligence and business gossip. The specialized business social networks are being joined by the consumer social networks where "business-centric applications" or widgets are being developed and launched at sites like Facebook according to Redmond Development News.  They also report that companies like Apple and Microsoft have set up employee networks on Facebook. 

Enterprise Social Networks
In the enterprise, we're seeing a range of applications that are promoted under the Enterprise Social Networking banner.  These range from full service networked applications with blogs, wikis, networks, video sharing, etc. tied together to more specialized applications targeting a sub-set of activities. 

In a recent interview I conducted with Geoff Hyatt CEO of Contact Networks, he described how his software was designed to solve a business problem that a number of consulting, law, investment and other professional service firms have - capturing and making the relationship asset information from throughout the firm available for use.  Contact Network's software is designed to operate behind the business firewall to enable the capturing of this data for business development purposes, improved client management and coordinating relationships.  He reports that one advantage of his service is that there is no data entry required on the part of highly compensated and busy team members, but rather the software captures, reports and can be queried on relationships based on the frequency, recency and length of customer relations identified through the data analysis of existing enterprise information systems. 

One advantage of closed enterprise social networks is the security and authentication inherent within network applications behind the firewall.

Other vendors that are in the Enterprise Social Networking space include major players like Microsoft, IBM and BEA Systems, but also smaller providers like the following:

• Awareness Networks
• Cerado Haystack
• Contact Networks
• Intronetworks
• Mentor Scout
• Ning
• SelectMinds
• Small World Labs
• Social Platform
• Pringo Networks
• Visible Path
• Web Crossing

If you have experience with any of these or are aware of other social networks, please let me know and I'll update my listing accordingly.