Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

I must admit I am a bit lost in the propensity of so called ‘guru’s to label everthing as 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and so on. Thats why I headed this blog post as 10.0 – I thought I would get a break on the pack and wait for others to catch up.

Is it just me. One of the tenets of the Social Web is that in many ways it is a call to humanise persona’s and audiences (Brian Solis) and its meant to engender connections between friends, peers, advocates, influencers, consumers and the like. Yet we seem to want to label everything as if its a new release of an operating system or some other application.

Now I sort of understood the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 though the inventors of the worldwide web argue that this was just jargon 2.0. The web was always designed to facilitate use cases we associate with Web 2.0 according to them – we just hadn’t got there. But there was no new technical specification between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.

Then we got Enterprise 2.0. Supposedly an Enterprise that utilises Web 2.0 to streamline processes whilst enhancing collaboration. But no one ever explained what Enteprise 1.0 was? An Enterprise that doesn’t use Web 2.0? Or it doesn’t use it to streamline processes? Was there a dot release between Enterprise 1.0 and Enterprise 2.0? Or is it you either upgrade or you don’t.

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2010 marked an important milestone in the young social media industry. Mainly because businesses began to leverage social media to be closer to their customers, have a better and almost real time understanding of their markets and reduce marketing expenditure while growing brand reputation and market share.

Businesses who are not leveraging social business technology to monitor, research, connect and collaborate socially with their clients will have a competitive disadvantage over those companies who do.

* 60-80% of purchase decisions are based on recommendations
* Time in the social web exceeded time spend on TV
* 16 Million search results on “has anybody experience with…” indicates that product and brand exploration is no longer influenced by traditional advertising

Social business tools will become strategic in 2011.

20 strategic social business tools for 2011:

Social Media Monitoring

Tools to monitor the market and gain deeper insights in what people talk about, what needs they have and what they are looking for. It helps identify influencer, major contributors and active voices for specific industries, products, markets or behaviors.

Tools include companies like Alterian/Techrigy*, Radian6, Sysomos* or Twitalyzer

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The grapevine is abuzz with rumors that Facebook will be launching its own webmail to compete directly with GMail and Yahoo Mail.

“Facebook has the world’s most popular photos product, the most popular events product, and soon will have a very popular local deals product as well. It can tweak the design of its webmail client to display content from each of these in a seamless fashion,” said TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid.

“And there’s also the social element: Facebook knows who your friends are and how closely you’re connected to them; it can probably do a pretty good job figuring out which personal emails you want to read most and prioritize them accordingly,” he added.

Also out this week is Apple iOS 4.2 which improves Wifi, video and cross Apple platform consistency.

Supporting a channel partner in today’s world has become a lot more complex as end-users are far more demanding and educated.

To me a channel partner is a company that partners with a manufacturer or producer to market and sell the manufacturer’s products, services, or technologies. This is usually done through a co-branding relationship. Channel partners may be distributors, vendors, retailers, consultants, systems integrators (SI), technology deployment consultancies, and value-added resellers (VARs) and other such organizations.

A channel partner will never have the insights into the product or services as the manufacturer has. Thus providing a framework, process and system to allow for the sharing of why the product is relevant to a customer is key to the success of the manufacturer and channel partner alike!

As outlined in my blog post on The Emperor’s clothes – Selling through Social Media – Why should you care? Clearly manufacturers would need to support a channel partner in either:

1. Communicating value – where the product is unique
2. Creating Value – where the product is a commodity

To effectively support the channel partner; manufacturers need to support the WHY – the cause or intention underlying an action or situation, especially in the phrase ‘the whys and wherefores’.

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