Group items tagged

Jeremiah Owyang discusses how web tools and social media enable companies to connect with customers Forrester Wave Report: The Leaders in Community Platforms for Marketers (Part 4/4)

Key findings of the 9 vendors

First of all, this is still a very young market, with the average tenure of a company being just a few years in community. Despite the immaturity, we evaluated nine and were impressed with Jive Software and Telligent Systems who lead the pack because of their strong administrative and platform features and solution offerings.

Jive Software makes enterprise-class social software that connects employees, customers, and partners. We have two flagship products: Clearspace, collaboration software that applies a people-centric approach to facilitate workforce networking and productivity, and solves the problems associated with legacy file-based systems; and Clearspace Community, community software that is used to engage customers, build brands, and accelerate marketing initiatives. Jive's social software solutions are used by more than 2,500 customers -- including over 15% of the Fortune 500.

Reversing the Enterprise 2.0 Pricing Model

Why is the Enterprise 2.0 market not taking off more strongly? The reason has to do partly with ill-conceived pricing structures: volume-discount (VD) schemes. Fix them, and you fix one of the obstacles preventing the market from expanding rapidly. And by fixing them is meant reversing them, in particular by using volume-increasing schemes. Pricing Tied to Volume Enterprise social computing offerings -- such as social networks or the numerous Twitter-for-the-enterprise applications that currently abound -- generally don't have complex pricing structures. They are volume-discount based: that is, the more accounts customers buy, and the more employees who use them, the larger the discount vendors give them, and the lower their average price per user will be. Some vendors advertise flat pricing schemes, but when a customer is big enough, a volume-discount deal inevitably creeps in. Value and Cost Out of Balance

Volume-discount pricing structures are simple, tried, and true. So, why aren't they efficient? The reason is because of where returns on investment (ROIs) are located. Enterprise social computing offerings provide increasing marginal productivity as they scale, at both the individual and organizational level. The more that employees use a service, the higher the margin gained by their company in productivity, and the more the company extracts value from the product. A corporate customer that has 10% of its employees using a Twitter-like product won't extract as much value as one that has 50% of its employees using it.

Value creation generates wealth

Any business has three levels of value definition - value defined by shareholders, customers and employees/partnership. Shareholder value is the primary value component no business can survive without and provides for the long term agility of an organisation. Customers provide medium term liquidity and employees the operational cash flow to ensure the continued operation of an enterprise. An enterprise architect must have a good understanding of wealth creation formula like economic value add to assess the contribution of IT to Wealth Creation

40 of the Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them

We all know brands are using Twitter — whether or not you want them around. Some of them don’t quite get the medium and just tweet self-serving links or marketing speak, but you won’t find any of those brands here. We’ve handpicked 40 of the best brands experimenting with the micro-blogging platform, and asked them a few short questions about how they’re using Twitter. If some of their responses seem short, well that’s because they are. I asked each brand correspondent to answer our queries in 140 characters or less. Most of them got the point, a few rambled on a bit too long, and only asked me if “u” was acceptable in lieu of “you.” All in all, we’ve found some amazing people, doing some pretty powerful things at big companies, and all via Twitter. Smart brands use Twitter in meaningful ways, and most of them use their brand name as a way to make sure customers can find and recognize them. This piece, and the knowledge I learned from the incessant hours invested, demonstrate why brands do belong on Twitter. No other medium gets you inside a business or brand quiet like Twitter. And if you’re a brand that didn’t make our list, let us know why your tweets deserve consideration in the comments.

Chevrolet

Webank | Are people replacing institutions?

Is the democratic and social nature of the internet changing the way we understand finance?

While in the past web-enabled innovation in the sector meant online banking and web-access to front-end customer services, there is today a growing set of organisations which remove banks and other institutions as intermediaries altogether.   Welcome to the world of peer-to-peer finance.

Yet another reminder of the old saying “Those who can do. Those who can’t teach.” You couldn’ be further from the truth. Facebook, or more generically any social networking platform, has significant advantages such as the ability to instantly add/configure/customize/network an application. This dramatically lowers the barriers to entry (correct on that point), but it also lowers the cost of switching for users. Yes, creating a standard (massive usage) creates a barrier to switching, but not an insurmountable barrier. Frankly, “social networking” as application is boring to me and it may prove to be a fad. I don’t really care about the minor personal gestures of my 400+ friends. But the social platform is exceptionally compelling to me as a user, developer and visionary. Social discovery and vetting of application is huge. I’ll drop one app and add a competitor in 2 minutes. My friends will do the same if it offers a compelling value. Your application of the old school metrics of the PC platform to a social platform ignores the low switching costs, social discovery of applications, incredibly low marketing costs and all of the other benefits of a social platform that will power future applications. The fact that one person in a dorm room can write a killer app that can spread virally is exceptionally powerful. That simply cannot happen on the PC. It can happen on the web, but having done it a couple of times myself, I can tell you it is costly. Will Facebook become the ultimate platform, will OpenSocial win, will browsers encapsulate social connectivity across all websites/webapps, will the semantic web finally deliver? I don’t know the winner, but social apps are here to stay. Yes there will be a lot of crap apps, but the social fabric will help separate the wheat from the chaff. Sorry, but I give your analysis an F :)

Facebook’s most important strategic asset is not its community of developers but its network of users.

Does Platform build or leverage this strategic asset?

An introduction to personas and how to create them Written by Tina Calabria, published March 2nd, 2004 Categorised under: articles, intranets, usability & information architecture, websites Before embarking on any intranet or website design project, it is important to understand the needs of your users. It is then possible to identify the features and functionality that will make the intranet or website a success, and how the design can support users with different goals and levels of skill. There are many ways to identify the needs of users, such as usability testing, interviewing users, discussions with business stakeholders, and conducting surveys. However one technique that has grown in popularity and acceptance is the use of personas: the development of archetypal users to direct the vision and design of a web solution. This article explains what personas are, benefits of using personas, answers to common objections about personas, and practical steps towards creating them. It is meant as an introduction to personas, and provides enough information to start creating your own. If you want to know more, there are lots of resources available, particularly the work of Alan Cooper and colleagues at Cooper Interaction Design. Alan is credited with having created the first persona for software development purposes back in the early 1980s.

What are personas? Personas are archetypal users of an intranet or website that represent the needs of larger groups of users, in terms of their goals and personal characteristics. They act as ’stand-ins’ for real users and help guide decisions about functionality and design. Personas identify the user motivations, expectations and goals responsible for driving online behaviour, and bring users to life by giving them names, personalities and often a photo. Although personas are fictitious, they are based on knowledge of real users. Some form of user research is conducted before they are written to ensure they represent end users rather than the opinion of the person writing the personas. Below is a sample persona for an intranet project. This persona describes Bob, a 52 year old mechanic that works for a road service company. From Bob’s persona you can start to get a feel for his goals when using the new intranet. He wants to avoid feeling stupid, would like to retain his status as a mentor to his younger colleagues, whilst seeing the potential of the intranet to make him more informed when interacting with customers.