After that, around the mid of this decade, we have seen a surge of interest for government-funded wireless infrastructures. Some cities have implemented these, either with own resources or relying on public-private partnerships. However these cities are in a minority, as the actual business case for a complete government-funded wi-fi coverage in urban areas is often far from being very clear.

Over the last year, due the economic recession, infrastructure investments have become popular again, both at the city and at the national level. What drives these calls is often a genuine desire for reaching out to parts of the population which are digitally excluded (e.g Australia) or to modernize historical icons (e.g. Venice).

There seems to be a great enthusiasm today and almost a religious fervor supporting more investments to give high speed broadband access to everybody, and very few questions about whether this has such a high priority as many think.

Case in point, the debate is very hot in Italy, where the national government apparently promised 800 million euro for broadband deployment, but such spending item did not make the cut in next year’s budget. At the same time, another debate is storming the financial capital (Milan), which is going to host the EXPO in 2015, to push for a free-for-all wi-fi access. Bloggers, communities, journalists use sentences as strong as “free wi-fi is a basic human right”. To those who try to show them that Internet access in the city is pretty high, the reply is that more bandwidth is needed to unleash the power of information. Incidentally Italy is only one example, but this is a common trend.

My position about this is that whether more broadband or free wifi are required depends on what other priorities for investment are. Is such an infrastructure going to be a component of a smart city strategy, where environmental monitoring, traffic management, smart electric grid all concur to bring the city to the next level? Is there a plan to improve the quality of education or health care or to help better deal with integration issues coming from largely uncontrolled immigration? The problem is that today like 15 years ago, the assumption is that “if you build it, they will come”.

Are we sure? The way many people use high-bandwidth Internet access do today is to access entertainment (including illegal downloading of music and movies or to use VOIP services like Skype to slash their telephone costs. Browsing the Internet for textual content, as well as a fair amount of social networking (where it is not terribly video-intensive) does not require very high-bandwidth, so there is probably still a fair amount of value that people can get from existing infrastructures, if they were just encouraged or educated to do so.

I am all for ultrafast, as-free-as-possible access with significant government investment, if this comes together with serious investments in education (at all levels), healthcare (telemedicine), public safety (web-based CCVT), traffic management (more intelligent road charging schemes), environmental sustainability (web-enabled air and water quality monitoring). One way of justifying a free-for-all wifi is to figure out how government operations could benefit from it: would a sufficient number of social workers be mobilized? would a sufficient number of teachers be able to overcome the limitations caused by insufficient or poor-quality physical infrastructures (school building, laboratories, etc)?

It is not good enough to ask governments to release the string of their purse without asking them to articulate convincing business cases about how they (and not only “the citizen” plan to use more broadband.

I attended IBM’s eighth annual Software Analyst Connect (#Connect09) last week in Connecticut. The theme of the event was “IBM Software for a Smarter Planet”.

You have to admire IBM for coming up with the Smart Planet branding strategy. Now anything Smart (Smart Cities, Smart Water even Smart Work) is automatically, subconsciously associated with IBM.

The Connect 09 event itself was superb. The delegates were all analysts and I was humbled to be in the company of so many really bright people.

It was a two day affair broken up into a healthy mix of keynotes, breakout sessions, round tables, an appliance showcase and chats with experts. The content level was very high and the networking opportunities were off the charts (I had face time with Steve Mills, Al Zollar, Sandy Carter and John Soyring (in the video above) to name-drop but a few).

The breakout sessions had titles like:

• IBM’s Industry Frameworks and Solutions for a Smarter Planet
• Driving Smarter Business Outcomes with Analytics and Information and
• Smart Work and Dynamically Adaptive Collaboration

So while the content was quite in-depth and at times extremely technical, unfortunately there wasn’t a strong emphasis on sustainability. This is no big surprise as this was never billed as a sustainability-related event.

Having said that IBM’s larger Smarter Planet strategy talks very much to the Internet of Things vision where everything is instrumented with RFID tags or sensors and inter-connected which has massive potential implications for making the world more sustainable.

Then the talks from Steve Mills referenced IBM’s work with utilities in the Smart Grid arena and the development of the SAFE Framework while John Soyring talked up IBM’s work around the world on Smart Water initiatives.

The one use of the Smart X lingo which IBM use and I do object to is Smart Oilfields. The thinking goes that Smart Oilfields are ones that extract oil more efficiently from the ground. I’m sorry, but CO2 is a pollutant which is endangering all life on this planet. Anything which helps put more CO2 into the atmosphere, cannot be very smart.

It was spectacular to get a chance to record my chat with John Soyring about IBM’s work on water globally. Take 10 minutes to watch the video above. You’ll be glad you did.

Full disclosure, IBM is a client and paid my airfare (economy) to attend the event, accommodation and all delegates received a gift of a solar phone charger.

One of these tools, made increasingly important by the success of Twitter and other microblogging platforms, is URL shorteners. These are web sites that convert very long web addresses into more compact ones.

Although their are mostly used on microblogs, which allow only a very limited number of characters, their use is rapidly expanding in other areas. The most recent one I’ve found is the PDF report on the “State of the eUnion” (a moderately interesting collection of papers on Government 2.0), where the reference list at the end of one article is a long list of shortened URLs.

I have used a few of these shorteners, as I write tweets about my new blog posts or about other stuff I want to share with people. Doing so, I’ve realized how much information you can get about who access the URLs you’ve shortened. These sort of statistics are very useful to understand who is visiting your blog, where they come from, and so forth. But they also raise the issue of whether and how such information may be used by URL shortening sites themselves, as it constitutes a goldmine to understand behaviors and to uncover emerging patterns.

Now, as I suggested in my previous post, if a URL shortening service goes out of business, my posts would no longer be reachable, nor would the articles referred in the book mentioned above. As we build knowledge based on shortened hyperlinks, we are making ourselves (and our collective knowledge) vulnerable to few weak links of the chain. Also, some people may grow uncomfortable with the idea of few organizations being at the junctions of our information society fabric, fearing that they may leverage such information in ways that ultimate constitute a threat to privacy or even democracy.

As a consequence, some will call for government action. I already received a comment to my earlier post praising the initiatives of certain governments – such as the US one – to provide a shortening service (so far available only to government employees).

But do we want government to be at those critical junctions? Are we prepared to give government the discretionary power of analyzing what matters to us, how we link to each other, how we retweet and hence rate our respective views, in return for some greater security that those junctions will be maintained over time? And, if it is not up to government to play this role, should URL shorteners be owned by communities, open-sourced and crowdsourced, so that each of us owns a piece of that fabric?

This is yet another example of how – despite the many articles, documents and plans – we really know very little about how “society 2.0” will evolve, what risks will emerge and what the most appropriate role for government will be.

• NOSQL Patterns
• Red Hat debuts virtualization management
  Gordon gives you the quick low-down on RedHat's virtualization strategy with KVM.
• Plethora of New Regulations Requires Data-Driven Enterprise
  Kind of a pass-thru piece for Informatica, but, hey, still good data for Wall Street is probably looking for. "The first one is making sure the data is relevant, explained Parthasarathi in an interview with Wall Street & Technology. "If a compliance officer is able to answer a particular question, but says I can't answer that question, that won't do," he says. The second challenge is to make sure the data is trustworthy and the third challenge is timely data, he said, adding, "The fines from missing the deadlines is increasing." Complicating the process further, data is spread across so many different systems, so that delivering timely data is a challenge, he adds. In order to respond to multiple regulators in the U.S. and abroad, asking for different types of data and quality levels, Parthasarthi said that firms need a data-driven enterprise."
• Con-way Freight’s Modernization Journey Using SOA at Mainframe Executive
  "Con-way Freight recently reached a milestone marking its arrival near the finish line of a decade-long journey to modernize its mainframe applications…. In the final stage, the EJBs and their methods were wrapped as standard Web services. With this, the team had arrived at SOA as we know it today." In the words of that ever quotable movie: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." Snarkyness aside, it's a pretty good and detailed write-up of mainframe modernization.
• So where's Microsoft's Live Mesh?
  Seems like Ray Ozzie is operating more in the consumer, end-user side of Microsoft rather than the IT, infrastructure side. Fair enough.
• Financial Firm CIOs Strongly Favor IBM, Aite Survey Finds
• What's next for Microsoft's Azure cloud platform?
  Addressing legacy IT in cloud transitions: "To enable existing apps to run on Azure, Microsoft is planning to make virtual machines (VMs) available to developers, which they will be able to customize and run their legacy apps inside them." Also: "Microsoft officials made a vague reference in this morning’s keynote to System Center in the cloud. I asked Srivastava if this meant Microsoft was looking to offer System Center as a Microsoft-hosted service, the way that it is offering Exchange and Office Communications Server as Microsoft-hosted offerings. That isn’t the case, he said; instead, Microsoft has opened up the Windows Azure management programming interfaces so that System Center — as well as third-party management products like HP OpenView — can manage Azure-hosted applications."
• Three new codenames and how they fit into Microsoft's cloud vision
  Crack-coverage from Mary-Jo: Azure consolidated down (compare to the complex IBM cloud burger) and three new project/layer names for VPN'ed cloud connections ("Sydney"), data marketplaces like Infochimps ("Dallas"), and AppFabric (app server, caching).
• A critical PDC for Microsoft
  "It sounds unlikely [that Microsoft will be the open web champions]; but where do you go if your mood is “anything but Google”? We could see some surprising new alliances; though I honestly do not see the Windows-Office empire within Microsoft accepting that kind of role under the current leadership."
• News Corp. Joined by Rivals Weighing Google Block
  Man, I love the story here: media fights back! I hope we see a lot more of this cause it's sure more exciting than watching news(papers) sulk in their booze over "free."
• Augmented Reality: Getting Beyond the Hype
  Check it out, whurley's now an augmented reality guy.
• Can (and will) Microsoft keep Silverlight compatible across platforms?
• Attentio raises €525,000 for social media monitoring and analysis software suite
• UK jails schizophrenic for refusal to decrypt files
• HP floats Q4 profit on services biz
• Microsoft begins paving path for IT and cloud integration
  Quick round-up of Microsoft cloud efforts and projects.
• WSO2 extending SOA into cloud computing
  WSO2 launches a cloud portfolio. To choose one of the items: "The WSO2 Cloud Connector products enable developers to offer fast and secure cloud services, WSO2 said. These include Cloud Services Gateway, offering a secure tunnel into an enterprise from a cloud, and Service Accelerator, decoupling quality of service processing from back-end services and enabling message-processing. The products are composed of a cloud virtual machine and a component running locally within an enterprise, enabling communication between enterprise and cloud systems."
• When Designing for Moblin, Think Like a Mobile User, Part 2
  Part two of a brief, but nice series on UX for mobile/hand-held devices (just generalize it from Moblin), e.g.: "The Moblin experience should be more like a media player than like a desktop application."
• Open Source Designers – A community of practice for design & user experience people in Open Source
  "If you’re doing design & user experience work in an open source community, then chances are we have a lot in common – no matter what community we’re working in. We have some big challenges every day, but we also know that if we can overcome those challenges we can make a really big contribution to the sustainability and increased popularity of open source software. The purpose of this site is to create a space where we can come together to share our experiences, to ask each other questions, to compare notes and to promote the projects we’re working on and help get some extra eyes on our work – and to act as a support network."
• When Designing for Moblin, Think Like a Mobile User: Part 1
  More than being targeted at Moblin, this is about designing for hand-held, mobile devices, e.g.: "snacking," how the battery running out effects UX/design, etc.
• Why Tim O'Reilly Sees Microsoft as a Proponent of the Open Web
• Linux owns 32 percent of netbook market, says study
• Pictures in Our Heads
  I thought he'd go into what it was like using an iPhone to write a column, but instead he goes all cyberpunk.
• Microsoft still working on an Adobe Lightroom competitor, but with a social twist
  Flickr/Yahoo! should be working on one of these. No one seems to be figuring out (gulp) "Photography 2.0."
• H-E-B to expand Allandale store

Official word from salesforce.com is that its recently announced Chatter product was developed in-house. And that would certainly be in keeping with the company’s history of staying away from M&A. Since it opened its doors a decade ago, salesforce.com has done just five tiny deals. The vendor certainly has one of the lowest ratios of total M&A spending (probably around $70m) to market capitalization ($7.7bn) of any of the big software vendors.

Nonetheless, there was some chatter (if you’ll pardon the pun) that salesforce.com may have acquired some technology from a small startup to shore up the recommendation engine portion of Chatter, a collaboration/social networking offering that’s slated to come out next year. The M&A speculation centered on a startup that perhaps provided some natural-language search capability. We would note that a small shopping trip by salesforce.com – if, indeed, there was one – to get some social networking/natural-language technology wouldn’t be without precedent. Rival CRM vendor RightNow tucked in HiveLive, which had just 25 customers, in a $6m deal last summer.

Whether or not salesforce.com went shopping for part of Chatter, it’s worth pointing out that the firm has used M&A as a way to go after Microsoft’s SharePoint in the past. In early 2007, the company picked up Koral, an early-stage content management startup that salesforce.com had effectively been incubating. (And on a smaller scale, several months after that, it quietly acquired a tiny social networking startup, CrispyNews.)

However, we’re guessing that those purchases, particularly the Koral deal, haven’t generated the returns that salesforce.com might have hoped. The vendor originally said that Salesforce Content – an add-on, extra-cost module based partly on Koral – could do to SharePoint (among other document management offerings) what salesforce.com did to Siebel in CRM. That hasn’t come close to happening. In fact, salesforce.com just announced that Content will be available free of charge to all customers.

Fittingly enough, on the one-year anniversary of our piece predicting continued consolidation of the social and casual gaming space, Electronic Arts announced the industry’s largest acquisition. The Redwood City, California-based videogame giant acquired Playfish on November 9 for $275m, although an earnout could mean that EA will pay as much as $400m over the next two years for the company. We estimate that Playfish, which will be slotted into the EA Interactive division, generated about $50m in trailing sales. Overall M&A continues to be strong in the still-niche gaming sector, with deal volume up about 25% from last year with about 35 transactions inked so far in 2009.

With the gaming industry seemingly in recovery mode after not-so-horrible earnings announcements from industry bellwethers EA and Activision Blizzard, we’re confident that more videogame and media companies will look to add social networking games. (After all, the big gaming players have used M&A as a way to buy a piece of a fast-growing, emerging market. For instance, EA spent $680m in cash four years ago for Jamdat Mobile to get into wireless gaming.) With Playfish off the board, which other social gaming startups might find themselves targeted by one of the big gaming vendors?

While there are literally hundreds of promising startups, most are too small to be important enough for a big buyer. Nevertheless, there are a few firms that have grown – both organically and inorganically – enough to make them attractive acquisition targets. For instance, Playdom, which develops games primarily for MySpace and Facebook, recently reached for a pair of smaller gaming startups. The company also recently raised $43m. Similarly, Zynga recently raised a funding round ($15m) and has also picked up two small startups this year. Two other names to watch in the emerging social gaming market are Digital Chocolate and Social Gaming Network Inc.

In response to Twitter's influence, we have launched five company Twitter feeds, @ForumOne, @OCReport, @DataMasher, @Legistalker, and @ProjectSpaces (a combined feed is here). These feeds currently have a total of about 15,000 followers, up from 4,000 in August. A number of staff also have personal accounts they manage (on their own time) which include a lot of company re-tweets and information and represent another 15,000 or so followers.

Here is our approach to this growing network:

Goals: As with all social media, we need to be clear about our goals, and whether Twitter supports them or not. In shorthand, our goals are 1) to sell more consulting services and products; 2) strengthen our ties with existing clients; 3) learn about social media to support our consulting; and 4) increase our general name awareness.

Current Priorities: In order to improve our effectiveness, we've focused on a number of areas. We wrote an internal guidelines document structuring our approach to Twitter. We've made a concerted effort to increase our tweeting and follower counts of relevant individuals. We've tried to improve the quality of our content (importance, grammar, format) as well as mentions when appropriate of "Forum One" (as opposed to "the company" or "F1", which we say internally). We've increased re-tweets across accounts when useful, and have decided on metrics of success which we review every other month.

Staffing: We have five staff responsible for most of our account management who all together spend about 15 staff hours per week on Twitter (tweeting, managing followers and answering direct messages). We currently use HootSuite which offers many advantages, but is not strong for joint account management. We've explored CoTweet and other platforms but haven't liked them enough to move.

Results to Date: Last month, across our five accounts, we had 317 tweets. Our "circulation" (tweets x followers) was 1.26 million, with about 5,000 "click-throughs" (which track only URLs shortened via HootSuite -- about one-third of total tweets). This gives us a click-through rate of around 16.7% (clicks divided by total all followers of our five accounts plus staff accounts) -- which is better than other Twitter click-through reports we've seen.

We feel like we've made good progress on all of the "current priorities" listed above. With respect to meeting our principal goals, we have little question that we've strengthened our ties to clients, learned about social media, and raised our company profile. We aren't yet sure about our first (and most important) goal of increasing consulting services or product sales directly attributable to Twitter. Connecting the dots from "marketing" to "sales" is always difficult. We have anecdotal information which is encouraging, but nothing unambiguous.

So on balance, we've invested a fair amount into Twitter, it is performing well in terms of growth and reach, and it clearly provides value towards goals we care about. The jury is still out whether it is crucial to driving our company marketing and growth efforts overall. We'll watch this issue closely over the next few months.

How is Twitter supporting your goals? What sort of performance are you seeing? Let us know in the comments.

Jim Cashel is Chairman at Forum One. Feel free to follow him on Twitter at @Cashel or write him at Cashel@ForumOne.com.

from outreach
to information exchange
to developing recommendations collaboratively
to agreements
to stakeholder action

At Forrester's EMEA Forum where David Cooperstein is presenting five things marketers can do to fight the recession.  David shares that Europeans remain pessimitstic about their financial future--although younger Europeans show more optimism than older ones. So, marketers still face trying to figure out if things have stabililized, if they're likely to get worse or if we truly are on an upswing that will lead consumers back.

David cites five things successful marketers are doing to survive the recession: According to David smart marketers:

1)Spend to align consumer interaction. At the height of the recession ING Bank invested 15 months.,more than five million Euros  and the time of 50 employees to integrate the ING and PostBank brands. They invested in channel syncronization & personalization in an effort that grew revenue, cut direct amail expenditures and  sped up campaign cycle times from 26 weeks to 4 weeks.

2) Change the game by changing the offer. Hyundai auto offers its customers 3 months worth of car payments if they lose their job after purchasing a new auto.

3)Buy share of voice when others can't. Kelloggs invested ad spend in 8 strategic brands growing their market share by staying in market while others stopped messaging

4) Use Social to raise awareness;  Toyota launched its IQ model with a blog of two people using the car in a hypermiling experiment.  The duo blogged, tweeted and posted their exploits on facebook driving 100 million impressions.

5) Use customer intelligence to prioritize activities.  Capital One used its database to identify customers most likely to respond to social media--instead of sending them direct mail the company engaged them in Facebook and other social spaces.

Do these ring a bell?  What other strategies has your company used to stay ahead of the curve?

follow me at davidcard

I'm hosting a panel on Millennials and TV at the Future of Television Conference later this week. I'm sure we'll talk about social media. And you might be surprised to see that one segment of the Millennial generation - today's teens - are perhaps more brand-loyal than you think. They just like to try new things more than adults do, and they depend on friends' advice more.

From a Forrester report (behind the paywall) on teen coolhunting:

Sixty percent of online teens say that when they find a brand they like, they'll stick to it, a figure that's just about the same as for online adults. However, nearly two-thirds of teens are willing to try something new. And three times more teens than adults say they're influenced by what's hot.

Two-thirds of online teens surveyed said they tell friends about products — that's almost twice as many as adults — and more than 70% of teens use social networks regularly. So it's critical for marketers to understand how to best use social networks to reach teens and to help them spread the word. Tapping into entertainment users, who are also cross-category influencers, is key.

During a breakfast meeting this morning, someone asked a very sharp question: Are businesses really operating differently because of social media? I then jumped in the car, drove from San Francisco back to our Foster City office, and heard how Cisco has used social media to change product launches.

The obvious change, of course, is lowering the cost, if you're not renting out the Moscone Center for a big launch party. Slightly less obvious changes include the ability to reach more people in more countries. , the virtual launch also makes it possible to reach more people, in more countries, than Cisco could with traditional face-to-face events.

So far, we're just considering changes in capability. Doing product launches cheaper, faster, better is an important innovation, but it's not a sign that a company is operating or thinking in a significantly different way. You might buy a cheaper, better, and faster car, but you might not change your driving habits one bit, or take more care to follow the traffic laws.

Therefore, during this conversation with Cisco, the one change from going to virtual product launches that really stuck out was operational: the marketing effort continues beyond the big ballyhoo day. Cisco employees remain engaged in conversations with customers through social media channels.

Contrast that with the old Moscone Center-style launch events. Everyone shows up for the big photo op, and then they go home. Sure, leads get entered into the CRM system, but that's hardly the same as continuing a conversation with the people you met at the launch event.

Of course, that means that some people at Cisco have to dedicate time to that continued conversation, instead of racing off to the next big launch event. There's a business decision behind allocating resources in this fashion, based on a different set of assumptions and calculations than the "marketer with a megaphone" launch events of 15 or 20 years ago.

Are social media for real? Yes, when they effect how companies operate.

[Cross-posted at The Heretech.]

The pharmaceutical industry and the FDA are in a strange position.  

People are discussing drugs and treatments all over net, from WebMD to the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Survivors’ Network.

But pharmaceutical companies can’t encourage or participate in this activity in any way. In one case in my research, a pharma company employee begged me to take down a reference to a site her company had sponsored – the logo was right there on the site – even though the company had provided an unrestricted grant and did not influence content in any way.

This level of hypocrisy is absurd, and serves no one.   Now PhRMA – the pharmaceutical industry organization – is proposing the creation of a logo that could be placed on social sites to indicate where information that meets the FDA’s guidelines for fair balance, non-promotion of off-label uses, reporting of adverse effects, and other regulations would be strictly followed.

This is an ideal way out of the current state. The logo should be prominent. Furthermore, I think pharma companies should moderate and appropriately respond to social activity, including blocking off-label suggestions and following up on adverse effects. This works now for GSK’s alli community , which exists only because alli is an over-the-counter drug and therefore is not subjected to the same level of scrutiny by the FDA.

Sure it’s expensive to do this moderation, but alli shows it can be done, and effectively. Pharma companies are enthusiastic about social media but terrified by the lack of FDA rules, which means they never know if they’ll be cited for inappropriate behavior.   It’s time for the FDA to indicate what behavior is appropriate, including moderation and the logo linking to fair-balance information. Then people who need information about medications will be able to benefit from peer content. It’s a lot better idea than leaving all that peer content on unregulated sites, and allowing pharma only with ads with pages of small print disclaimers. How 20^th century!

Unfortunately I feel that most companies are still unable to fully grasp the importance of a dedicated social media team. They do not see a direct correlation between social media and ROI, and therefore are hesitant to put as many resources (both people and money) into social media as is typically necessary. Granted, I was on the periphery of social media for the last three years while I was in graduate school; however since my graduation and re-immersion into social media, I haven't noticed much of a change. Most social media job postings are for intern positions.

I think, even still, a lot of organizations (executives and HR) don't understand what we do, and therefore tend to undervalue it. I was laid off from my previous job last year and although I found another job fairly quickly, compensation was a struggle. I ended up settling for less compensation than I wanted in order to get back in a job quickly.

Engagement with the online community and interacting with others in the field is the most rewarding part of my job.

Because community management is often rooted in customer support organizations, compensation tends to be determined relative to CSRs. In fact, more and more community managers play a critical role in shaping customer experience and ultimately brand, and their compensation needs to reflect that value in a way more commensurate with significant marketing roles.

Perhaps the only one other comment I would suggest is that the corporate world needs to understand that community building is a full time job and as such we need official job descriptions put together by HR that are aligned with the business needs as well as the personal career development opportunities from knowledge workers. Something we haven't even started to think about just yet!

Unless Online Community and Social Media is considered a valuable part of an organization and an intrical part of the overall customer touch processes, it won't get the resources and funds to grow. The value given directly correlates into the # of bodies dedicated to support it and the salaries that are paid.

Here's an important rule of thumb, if you're a researcher such as myself: Don't name something unless it really exists. That sounds fairly obvious, but unfortunately, in the history of the technology industry, there's a sad history of failed neologisms. In some cases, these phrases exaggerated the importance or complexity of some relatively mundane aspect of the world. That's how the superheated usage of the term knowledge management turned into a four letter word. In other cases, people use neologisms designed to describe things that might (or might not) exist in the future as if they already existed now. I've heard some presentations about the Semantic Web that certainly fall into that category.

Therefore, when I use a phrase like social product management, believe me, I'm using it very carefully. Over the course of the last week, I've had occasion to use it on several occasions, most recently at last night's open house for PMs in the Forrester Foster City office. (Thanks to all who attended, by the way.)

Social product management passes the sniff test for neologisms because it describes something that's really happening: social media are changing the way that product managers and product marketers work. Here are a few manifestations, excerpted from the research I've been doing for the last several months:

• Social media figure increasingly in the to-do lists for PMs. Whether it's answering forum postings or monitoring "chatter" about your company on Twitter, PMs are spending more time using social media to get some aspects of their job completed.
• Social media demand new skills to master. It's abundantly clear that using social media, in either an inbound or outbound capacity, takes real skill. Unfortunately, not everyone has learned how to  spot the social media outlets where particular kinds of stakeholders congregate, or how to collect and interpret a representative sample of aggregate social media activity.
• Social media frequently require investment. It takes time and effort to figure out which social media channels are worth your attention. In some cases, new tools, such as listening platforms, can be a big force multiplier in these efforts.
• Social media require new attitudes to work. Everything falls apart if the company isn't ready to take social media seriously. Strangely, customers expect social media to be the place where conversations happen, instead of providing yet another brand of megaphone for vendors to announce their greatness. They also expect you to follow up on these conversations. Weird, but true.
• Social media foment professional crises for PMs. The natural consequence of the previous bullets are some tough conversations between PMs and their managers. Topics include How the hell do you expect me to do this in my free time to Why use these new sources of intelligence if we continue to make the same mistakes in the decision-making process? However these conversations turn out, the fact that they're happening at all means that social media are having a real effect on the PM job.

Let's be clear: I'm not saying that social media obliterate everything that PMs used to do. Far from it. In pretty much every aspect of the job where social media are relevant, they supplement existing PM tasks, deliverables, or resources. For example, as useful as innovation sites may be (users propose features, comment on them, vote on them), you still need to have occasional face-to-face conversations with people in customer organizations. If 5,000 people vote for a great new feature, Ion flux regulator, that doesn't tell you why it's important to them, how they expect it to work, and other critical details that bear directly on prioritization and design decisions.

Therefore, the phrase social product management does have weight and purpose, to the extent that social media are changing the way that PMs in the tech industry work. Me absolvo, it's not just another meaningless buzzword.

[Cross-posted at The Heretech.]

Then came "Gov 2.0" and the trumpets sounded for transparency of government data and innovation.

Now, Hope Street Group (a Forum One client) has opened up the policy making process with a new collaboration platform: Policy 2.0.

The concept is simple. The three steps are:

1. Recruit engaged citizens from outside of government -- most importantly the people directly impacted by the policy


2. Provide them with the tools to learn about, collaborate and refine real world policy recommendations


3. Give them a microphone and access to government leaders to advocate for and implement these recommendations

Hope Street Group pilot tested its Policy 2.0 model this past summer with a project to craft recommendations that improve teacher evaluation systems nationwide.

"Recommendations like this generally come from researchers and policymakers, administered top-down in states, districts, and eventually schools," according to Monique Nadeau, Executive Director of Hope Street Group. "But Hope Street Group recognizes that teacher and administrator input is critical in designing and implementing teacher evaluation systems, and this project really brought their voices to the table."

The pilot team comprised 22 K-12 educators, 6 private sector professionals, and 8 participants from the civil society sector across 17 states. They collaborated online on the Jive community platform, the recommendations were published in a report, and the results were presented at an October 26 event at the National Press Club.

Hope Street Group and team leaders from the pilot project then took their recommendations to Capitol Hill.

What's most exciting about this platform is that it puts the power to craft real policy solutions in the hands of the engaged citizen, whether that citizen is a teacher who wants to have input in the policy that impacts his/her livelihood, or a community member motivated by a desire to improve a failing school district.

In the coming months, Hope Street Group and its Policy 2.0 community will be busy identifying targets and implementing its teacher evaluation recommendations in 10 or more districts, expanding its policy focus into health reform and looking to the public for the next great policy area to tackle.

Where do you go when you need the answer to a question?

While writing the first chapter of Harnessing the Groundswell, I wanted to cite a case -- a movie that recently tanked due to bad online buzz during its first weekend. I recalled the example, but not the movie.

Did Google have the answer? I tried combinations like "movie tanked word of mouth" and got nothing. (There is a right combination of words to get this -- can you guess it? Do you want to spend your time guessing stuff like that?) Google news, which is where I started looking, was similarly useless.

Twitter search is useless, too, since the event in question happened months ago.

So I asked Twitter.

In minutes, I heard back from nine people with the answer, Sacha Baron Cohen's Brüno. @DwriteN linked me to her paper on the topic. @ericcomes cited an Infegy buzz study, which I'll probably footnote in the book. Others suggested Valkyrie and Gentlemen Broncos as alternatives.

People's brains. What an incredible resource!

P.P.S. the secret key word for google was "decline".

For this first open house, we'll be discussing how social media are changing the job descriptions, priorities, deliverables, and required skills for PMs. All are welcome, the event is free, just come on down.

• Defining and creating a community strategy by working with organizational and customer stakeholders to determine needs, goals and key influencers.
• Determining what metrics are important to track, what is currently being measured against what many companies want to measure, and current key performance indicators, featuring research from the Online Community Research Network.
• Defining the value of online communities through the key sources of value, including: cost reduction, lead generation, increased engagement, building customer loyalty.


The virtual event is featured in two time sessions on November 11th.

• 5am to 10am PT / 8am to 1pm ET / 1pm to 6pm GMT, or
• 10am to 3pm PT / 1pm to 6pm ET / 6pm to 11pm GMT




Social CRM Virtual Summit Agenda

The social media revolution has changed everything, including how customers choose to interact with companies and each other online, and where they turn for trusted information. This virtual summit comes at a time when companies are starting to see tangible financial results from deeper online engagement with customers, and will explore the current capabilities of and future for Social CRM.

At this five-hour live, virtual summit you will experience:



• Webcasts by industry luminaries such as Mike Fauscette (IDC), Bill Johnston (Forum One), Jeremiah Owyang (Altimeter Group), and Ray Wang (Altimeter Group) in a virtual auditorium
• Scheduled live chats with industry experts and practitioners from companies including Barnes and Noble, Lenovo, National Instruments, Redfin, Best Buy, Juniper Networks, and T-Mobile
• An interactive exhibit hall with dynamic sponsor booths, including Genesys, ON24, Ant's Eye View, Forum One Communications, CRM Media, Cognizant, and Liveperson
• A resource center with dozens of valuable white papers, podcasts, and presentations for download
• A virtual networking lounge to meet other like-minded professionals through live chat
• Keynote speeches from CRM thought leaders, Paul Greenberg (The 56 Group) and Brent Leary (CRM Essentials)


Summit keynote speakers include Social CRM thought leaders, Paul Greenberg and Brent Leary.

Go here to register for this free event and to see the complete agenda.

I was looking over the winners and finalists from the Forrester Groundswell Awards and it hit me: this proves excellence in social media can come from anywhere.

The consumer and employee winners sell car races, yarn, security software, credit scores, books, and shipping. The B2B winners sell computer products, marketing services, online services, regulatory compliance services, environmental services, and enterprise risk services.

The finalists came from a diverse set of industries including travel, education, retail, financial services, auto, media, wine, weight loss help, insurance, and steel manufacturing. Not to mention a product that lets women go the bathroom standing up.

The methods are diverse, too. The winners included online market research communities, blogs, podcasts, a word of mouth campaign, and online communities. Finalists used YouTube, widgets, avatars, idea communities, Facebook, and online events. And a number of successful entrants created campaigns that spanned multiple social channels.

The geographic diversity wasn't as great, but one winner was from Australia and one finalist came from Brazil. In the past we've gotten some fantastic European entries.

Look, people the message is this: Do not tell me you cannot do this. People in every country and in every industry, with all sorts of customers and all sorts of management and all sorts of objectives, are creating not just innovative but incredibly effective social applications. I've worked with six insurance companies in the last two years. I just talked to a bunch of milk processing executives ("got social?"). I have yet to find a company, an industry, or a geography that can't benefit from connecting its customers with each other through social.

There are no excuses left. Just do it.

This will go live just as I'm announcing the winners at the Forrester Consumer Forum. These awards are based on business performance, and with 140+ entries this year, they represent truly outstanding social technology applications. If you want to learn how to do social technology applications with real results, please click through and read these entries -- you're sure to learn a lot. This is a long post, since it includes all 13 winners and the finalists in each category.

Business to Consumer Division

B2C Listening

Finalists

Intercontinental Hotel Group / Communispace
McNally Smith College of Music / Risdall Marketing Group
Walmart SmartMoms Community / Martin Agency and Communispace

Winner

NASCAR Fan Council / Vision Critical

NASCAR and Vision Critical created a community of 12,000 fans and used it to reduce research costs by 80%. NASCAR took the community’s suggestion and changed its restarts from single file to double file, which fans loved. They also improved brand attributes including “thrilling and exciting” and “down to earth” by at least 10%.

B2C Talking

Finalists

Bank of America Morris on Campus / Organic
GoGirl Conversations / Risdall Marketing
HootSuite 2.0 Launch Campaign
MasterCard Brazil “What’s Priceless To You?” / Universal McCann & McCann Erickson
TripAdvisor More Than Footprints Charity Campaign

Winner

Lion Brand Yarn Blog and Podcast / Converseon

Converseon identified influential bloggers and social networks dedicated to knitting and crocheting. Entering this conversation, Lion Brand Yarn created a biweekly podcast that generated 15,000 to 20,00 downloads and a blog featuring “knit-alongs” so customers could work on the same project at the same time. This drove impressive ecommerce at the brand site, including people ordering the knit-along projects. Those who visited the company’s social media were 41% more likely to buy at the Web site.

B2C Energizing

Finalists

Adobe Students Real or Fake
Intuit Social Campaigns
Jeep Experience / Organic
Mad Men Yourself / Deep Focus
Redwood Creek Blaze the Trail / Affinitive

Winner

Norton Advocates / Zuberance

Zuberance’s simple yet clever program identifies those who are most likely to promote a product through surveys, then gives them the tools to put their reviews on sites like CNET and Amazon. Using Zuberance’s word of mouth platform, Norton recruited 10,000 of its fans or advocates and helped them to post 1000 reviews on online review sites. Among the amazing results for Norton after this campaign was that its average rating on consumer sites shot up from two to four stars, and its Net Promoter Score doubled.

B2C supporting

Finalists

Atkin’s Community / Powered, Inc.
Lenovo Customer Community
Marriott Rewards Insiders / LiveWorld

Winner

myFICO Online Customer Community / FICO

FICO, an organization that scores consumers on credit, created a site where consumers can share credit knowledge, experiences, and advice with each other. Because FICO was prevented by regulations from advising customers on how to improve credit scores, it created a community where those customers could help each other. Among the results: a 1% decrease in support costs (costs had gone up 23% in the previous year) and 10% of all support calls are directed to the community, cutting the amount of time CSRs need to spend on the phone. Plus 39% of search engine traffic now lands on a community page, and 13% of all online sales include viewing one of those community pages. Finally, a customer spends on average 66% more after joining the community.

B2C Embracing

Finalists

Adobe Acrobat Ideas / BrightIdea
Hyundai ThinkTank / Passenger
Justin.tv Feedback Forum / UserVoice

Winner

Scholastic Book Clubs Reading Task Force Community / Communispace

Scholastic truly embraced the input of the community in its project to redesign the flyer that is its main vehicle for book sales through schools. Using a community of 200 teachers and 100 parents, the company embarked on a 10 week collaborative process to improve the design of its school flyer. The process generated ideas like including student recommendations and showing interior pages so parents could judge the reading level of the books. Results – the new flyer has already generated a 3% increase in sales in test markets.

Employee and Non-Profit Division

Managing

Finalists

AFLAC Field Force Buzz
American Family Facebook
ArcelorMittal Web TV
Xerox Competipedia

Winner

UPSjobs Problem Solved / TMP Worldwide

UPSjobs, a social program created with advertising agency TMP Worldwide, reached 4 million job seekers in one year. It included employee videos of actual UPSers, email, employee retention marketing, college recruitment, search engine optimization, job boards, search engine marketing, and social media sites including MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, YouTube, radio, cable television, text messaging, mobile marketing, and the newspaper. 30,000 responses came from mobile marketing alone. Since January the program has generated 345,000 job applications, at a cost of 75 to 80% less than traditional newspaper ads in many cases.

Social Impact

Finalists

CaringBridge.org Online Communities of Care
Boundless Fundraising / Charity Dynamics

Winner

Flowerdale Bush Fire Social Outreach

Flowerdale, a community in Victoria, Australia, was was devastated by the Black Saturday bushfires. 13 people died, 224 houses were lost. The Flowerdale Recovery Committee used blogs, the video site Vimeo, YouTube, and Flickr in a coordinated social effort to raise money to rebuild the town. Social media has helped build a village in a few weeks, raising over $1.5 million, including donations of goods like cars. It has also been crucial in keeping residents informed, liasing with media and government and maintaining a historical record that the Australian National Library wants to put into the national archive. According to the organizers, "We couldn't have coordinated the 20 organisations involved without the wiki."

Business to Business Division

B2B Listening

Winner

CDW Advisory Board / Communispace

Communispace created a research community for B2B retailer CDW, which used it to redefine its sales techniques, generating a 17% increase in customer value.

B2B Talking

Finalists

Blurb Inc.’s Killed Ideas / Ammo Marketing
Juniper Networks Fast Track Promotion

Winner

The Conversation / Eloqua

Eloqua, a marketing services company, created “The Conversation, a online sales tool, and promoted it with blogs, Twitter, social networks, and emails. 18-20% of those who participate convert to leads.

B2B Energizing

Finalists

Mashup Developer Community / JackBe & Never Stop Marketing
NIWeek Activities / National Instruments
Web & Social Media at Impact 2009 Conference / IBM Corporation

Winner

UNLEASH 2009, The Mediasite User Conference / Sonic Foundry

Sonic Foundry’s social applications for its 2009 User Conference included online video, Webcasts, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. They created persistent online value from the conference and helped conference attendance, engagement, and satisfaction.

B2B Spreading

Finalists

Inbound Marketing University / Hubspot, Inc.

Winner

MetricStream Community / Regalix

Regalix created a community for MetricStream – a regulatory compliance solutions provider. The portal has 500,000 users and generates 30% of the company’s sales leads.

B2B Supporting

Finalists

NetApp Community
SAP support forums

Winner

commonground Global Community For Environmental Professionals / EDR

The commonground community for environmental professionals helped increase EDR’s search ranking and contributed to 93% of its clients rating its service good or excellent.

B2B Embracing

Finalists

Chordiant Mesh / Chordiant Software
Thwack / Solar Winds

Winner

The Archer E-GRC Ecosystem / Archer Technologies

The Archer E-GRC Ecosystem, including both a community and an application exchange, generated 1529 ideas for Archer Technologies' enterprise risk, governance, and compliance business.

• Web sites (five)
  
• Blogs (five)
  
• Newsletters (two)
  
• Twitter (six accounts)
  
• Electronic press releases
  
• LinkedIn page
  
• Facebook page
  
• Scribd
  
• Slideshare
  
• Flickr
  
• YouTube
  
• Delicious
  
• Events sites (eventbrite, upcoming)
  
• Paid channels (Google, Facebook)
  

• Receive high effort: Web, Blogs, Twitter, Newsletters
  
• Receive some effort / appear to be useful: Press releases, Slideshare, Delicious, Event sites
  
• Receive low effort / watching: LinkedIn, Facebook, Scribd, Flickr, YouTube, Paid channels
  

Shel Israel has written a great book, Twitterville, that really shows how businesses large and small can use Twitter as a communications tool. I loved it because of the richness of the stories. Worth your time.

We conducted an experiment -- we did an interview via Twitter earlier today. As one of our spectators, rrupinski, commented: "Interesting experiment - but like watching conversation by telegraph." I found the content interesting, but the delay between when tweets are entered and when they appear made this challenging. Twitter has the reputation of being real-time, and it is a very immediate medium, but measured in minutes, not in seconds. Anyway, as a Groundswell blog reader you get to see the results neatly packaged up for your reading pleasure, below. (This is basically a transcript, but I've made edits to assemble sentences together, fixed spelling, and removed irrelevant comments. But you can still see the abbreviated Twitter style showing through.) My questions are in bold.

jbernoff: Good morning and good afternoon. Welcome to our Twinterview with @shelisrael, the author of Twitterville. http://bit.ly/2qVoc If you want to follow the conversation, I recommend this search on Twitter: http://bit.ly/3XTob3

jbernoff Let's get started. First Q: There are already lots and lots of books on social media. Why write another?

shelisrael: The stories of the business & people who have thrived in the community. Hopefully it will give readers some ideas. 

jbernoff I found the stories in the book great and insightful. But is Twitter, one tool, worth a whole book? Why?

Great question Josh. Last I checked there were 24 books on Twitter at AMZN. I regret to say that most of them are damned good. What makes mine different from the other 23 is I try to tell you the stories mostly of business folk who have succeeded on twitter. What make my book unique is the story-telling approach

jbernoff: So, sum it up for us. What would you say are the three to five biggest takeaways from the book?

shelisrael: 1. Twitter more closely emulates real life behavior online than anything that preceded it. 2. It's a tool of communications not marketing 3. It works best in many cases w/other SM [social media] tools. 4. It's as diverse in application as the telephone or email. 5. In a few years a biz without twitter will be like a biz without phone.

jbernoff: Interesting what you say about Twitter being a comm tool. Is Twitter really best for marketing, or for customer service?

shelisrael: Comcast shows a killer app for support. CarlsJr feels it is succeeding with marketing to young males with attitude. Narrowing Twitterville to just 1 biz function is like the blind men describing an elephant.

jbernoff: As writers, you and I know that big thoughts need concentration. But Twitter is conversational. What would you say to the argument that online conversation is destroying our ability to concentrate?

shelisrael: I think those studies should be taken with a grain of salt. Through history "experts" have produced studies about cars, cellphones, email, the web. Last week a study said SM is like cigarettes. All have some truth to them; none are THE truth. All innovation carries unfortunate consequences; not enough to stop progress.

jbernoff: My next book is on the power that technology gives individuals, both employees and customers. How do you think Twitter contributes to empowering individuals? What changes will this cause?

shelisrael: Great book idea Josh. I see the power of the individual in SM enhanced by the network. We are all network nodes. It's a human application of Metcalfe's Law. We are all exponentially empowered as individuals.

jbernoff: What happens with Twitter when employers don’t trust their employees?

shelisrael: Compaies that have not learned to hire & maintain employees they CAN trust are likely to lose best to wiser employers in better economic times.

jbernoff: What’s the #socialnetiquette of using Twitter both professionally and personally? It can be confusing.

shelisrael: I think netiquette & ethics remain constant regardless of the venue. Rudeness at a social gathering looks the same in SM.

jbernoff: I agree in general about #socialnetiquette. But professionals are talking about personal stuff. Can get a bit dicey.

jbernoff: Twitter makes you egotistical. Twitter makes you humble. Which is it?

shelisrael: I don't think Twitter makes you anything that you aren't already. You just have more witnesses for better or worse.

jbernoff: My short review: Read Twitterville. This little book will change the way you think about 140 characters, marketing, and yourself.

The real-time web is creating new opportunities in business, media, communication and collaboration. We are bringing together industry leaders using the real-time web in social networks, financial services, media and nonprofit groups to discuss:

* the state of the art, science and business of the real-time web

* efforts to create standards and interoperability

* challenges in user experience, technology and monetization.

I like to interview authors and other thinkers for the Groundswell blog, but this time we'll do it a little differently. We'll do it on Twitter.

This Friday, 16 October, I'll begin Twittering questions to @shelisrael, and he'll respond to @jbernoff . The interview will start at 12:00 eastern time, 9:00 pacific time.

You can follow the conversation even if you're not a Twitter user. Just go to this address and watch at the appropriate time:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=jbernoff+shelisrael

We'll also be using the hashtag #tville to identify our tweets.

I'll also be posting an edited transcript after the interview is over, so if you miss it, just watch this space.

One more thing. Because Twitter allows anybody to address anybody, some of you may wish to join in this conversation, but to avoid chaos and improve the experience, I'm going to concentrate on the thread of my interview from 12:00 to 12:30 ET. That is, while you can of course tweet at me or Shel during that time, don't be surprised if I don't respond to your tweets as they happen.

Think of this as you would a panel at a conference. We’ll be talking mostly to each other, at least for the first half hour. You can Twitter notes to us and talk amongst yourselves, but we’ll only be answering those if they go along with the thread of what we’re talking about. At 12:30, we’ll take more questions from the “audience” -- that is, we'll look more closely at the tweets from the rest of you and respond to some of them.

I'm looking forward to seeing if this experiment works -- and regardless, with Shel on the line we'll all learn something interesting about Twitter.

As with other recent waves of innovation (Web 2.0 and cloud computing, for example) there is no single definition of what the term "real-time Web" means. As a result, it is used as a catch-all phrase for a number of developments underway. At this point, we can identify that the real-time Web...:
1. is a new form of communication,
2. creates a new body of content,
3. is real time,
4. is public and has an explicit social graph associated with it,
5. carries an implicit model of federation.

• In general, organizations need to do a more thorough job of defining their business objectives for online community engagement, assessing ways to measure progress towards these objectives, reaching beyond their native platform metrics capabilities, and finding ways to measure the more qualitative components of community member engagement.
• The Role of the Community Manager is increasingly important to developing and refining business process, and measuring performance in these new “social spaces.”
• There is a growing need for community metric standards that are platform and vendor-independent.

• 20% (34) We stick with what the platform can provide
• 61% (100) We work from a strategy based on business goals and find solution to help us measure what we need
• 19% (31) We try to measure everything, will develop more of a strategy later

• 152 Responses - Unique Visitors
• 150 Responses - New Member Registrations
• 143 Responses - Page Views
• 126 Responses - Visitors
• 116 Responses - Message Posts
</ ul>

The top 5 items that online communities don’t measure, but want to are as follows:

• 90 Responses - Member Satisfaction
• 90 Responses - Influencer / Evangelism
• 84 Responses - Member Life Cycle
• 83 Responses - Member Loyalty
• 73 Responses - Referrals to Community


TAKEAWAY:
The top 5 items that online communities currently measure for tracking and reporting are the same for both profit and non-profit organizations and include Unique Visitors, New Member Registrations, Page Views, Visitors and Message Posts.

Non-profit organizations concentrate on measuring Podcasts & Video Links and Member Satisfaction, more often than other organizations, whereas commercial organizations place more attention on measuring Retention / Attrition, Member Loyalty, Member Blog Posts and Conversion than non-profit organizations.

As organization’s community strategies mature, the trend to primarily report on basic web metrics (page views, registrations) will be replaced by metrics that speak to the health of the community, the strength of members’ networks, the quality and type of member participation, and more robust measurements of member engagement. The data suggest that we are on the cusp of the evolution from “basic” community metrics to more robust and contextual reporting.

Currently Measuring - Profit and Non Profit


A larger version of the graph can be downloaded here:
http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/images/metrics_tracked_2009_graph.png



Top 3 Key Performance Indicators

From Question 19: What are the 3 most important community key performance indicators in the reports you send to management?

SUMMARY:

• 32% (74) User Activity / Engagement
• 21% (49) Membership Count [New Registrations, Active]
• 18% (42) Number of Posts / Comments
• 5% (12) Member Satisfaction / Loyalty
• 4% (10) Number of Questions Answered
• 4% (10) Sales Revenue - Up Sell, Cross Sell, Renewals
• 4% (8) Leeds / Referrals Generated
• 3% (6) Number of Downloads
• 3% (6) Number of Influencers / Evangelists
• 2% (5) Visitor Retention
• 2% (5) Number of Conversions
• 1% (2) Donations Received
  
• 1% (2) Visitor Geographic Dispersal


TAKEAWAY:
Almost a third of respondents indicated that User Activity / Engagement (32%) is one of the most important key performance indicators in the reports that they sent to management. Within the User Activity / Engagement category, the following 3 key performance indicators were the most commonly reported:


• 33 Number of Page Views / Clicks
• 22 Number of Site Visits
• 19 Number of Unique Visits


The other two key performance indicators that many respondents input into management reports are Membership Count (21%) (including new membership and total membership count) and the Number of Posts / Comments (18%) received on their site.

User Activity / Engagement is the number one item to track for both profit and non-profit organizations. Within this category the specific key performance indicators were dispersed similarly, with the profit based organizations having a slightly higher percentage ratio on key performances such as the Number of Threads reported and General Participation. Non-profit organizations, on the other hand, have a slightly higher percentage ratio on reporting metrics such as Number of Returning Visitors and the Number of Site Visits.

Another common response from profit based organizations was related to reporting key performances such as Sales Revenue and the Number of Conversions whereas non-profit organizations had a higher percentage response rate for reporting the amount of Donations Received.















USER ACTIVITY / ENGAGEMENT 34% (BROKEN OUT):

















Access to the Full Report
For members of the Online Community Research Network, the report is included as a benefit of your annual subscription. If you are interested in joining the OCRN, or learning more about the Network's activities, please go here.

The Online Communities: Metrics and Reporting 2009 report is also available for purchase for $295.

• Big Communities to Tackle Big Problems


• Turning to the Crowd: Ideas and Contest Sites


• What You Need to Know About the Mobile Communities Revolution


• Social Marketing & Advertising


• How Online Communities are Reshaping News


• Social “ME”dia: Employees as Brand Advocates


• Operationalizing Social Media - Reshaping the Organization

• Kevin Bertram, Distributive Networks


• Sharon Carothers - Legacy


• Austin Heap – Haystack


• Lila King – CNN.com


• Erika Kuhl - Salesforce.com


• Paul Levine, Current Media


• Miles Orkin, America Cancer Society


• Bruce Smith - Answers.com


• Hardy Wallace - Murphy-Goode Winery


• Joi Podgorny – Head of Community, Mindcandy


• Lucia Willow – Pandora.com


• Ryan Wilson, XPrize

What should the CEO take away from this?

1) The report showed renewed focus on return on investment measures for marketing -- this is a healthy development that will help you post-recession. ROI analysis will eliminate, or at least minimize future marketing nonsense.

2) Social marketing is here to stay. It's time for you to understand it.

3) Budget cuts are forcing marketing to use more internal IT/BT resources. This is driving long-delayed collaboration between marketing and IT/BT -- critical to your future brand building. As I've said for years: When you give the Web site to IT/BT, they will screw up the customer. If you give it to the marketers, they will screw up the technology. There's only one path forward -- the two groups have to work together. Use some political capital and grease these skids.

4) Here's a nit -- but something you should bring up with your CMO. The report revealed that marketing was cutting deeply in online display ads (those ads you see in Web sites) -- too deeply in Forrester's opinion. We believe that this could endanger sales and brands as the economy recovers. Make sure that your marketing team is being judicious, not self-immolating.

At a recent IDC conference on cloud computing, we were surprised at how well the retail industry was represented among the attendees. These attendees told us that their motives were investigative – they were there to learn, not to start buying. They also told us that their interest was in “private clouds” – using the technologies behind utility computing and public cloud offerings to operate their own cloud for provisioning, running, and managing their corporate applications.

Taxonomies for cloud computing are proliferating (the most comprehensive ones being produced by IDC), but for the purposes of this discussion we will simplify and consider three types of clouds:

• Walk up Clouds. These are applications that are available, usually for a nominal fee if not free, for mass use and are provisioned simply by the user visiting the website. The applications usually entail personal productivity products like word processing, spreadsheets, calendars, etc. Google Apps are a good example. As these applications gain sophistication in functionality, security, and interoperability, they can be viable alternatives for at least a subset of a retailer’s user base.
• Sign Up Clouds. These are applications that are offered on SaaS basis but require some contractual relationship to be consummated and involve some measure of implementation including user provisioning, process instantiation, and data migration. The most famous example is salesforce.com, but Global Retail Insights (GRI) is seeing retail specific traction in merchandise planning (Predictix), supply chain collaboration (Generix) and associate training (Ignite). European retailers seem to be particularly open to consuming software in this way although it is hard to say if they are taking a broad cloud view of these offerings or just see them as individual pieces of the portfolio that just happen to be delivered in an on-demand model.
• Sign In Clouds. This category is what the retailers at the conference were describing as a private cloud. Infrastructure that can quickly and easily provision users, applications, and resources to the entire breadth of locations supported by IT in retail. The premise goes well beyond just using the underpinning hardware and systems management – it would also allow the organization to connect to walk up and sign up clouds while maintaining oversight and control.

Looking at Cloud Benefits From Both Sides Now – Lower Costs and Greater Capability

Recent GRI research has looked at the business benefits of running POS systems from a centralized architecture. By taking servers and associated management challenges out of the stores, retailers can save significant costs in operation and maintenance. Extending this further by transitioning centralized POS delivery to the notion of a private cloud can magnify these savings even further.

However, benefits go beyond reductions in TCO. Imagine a store manager who, in the context of serving her specific demographic, is able to create a custom application set for workforce scheduling, signage, merchandising, sourcing, et al without disengaging from corporate systems and performance reporting. Or consider the ability to connect key suppliers to the private cloud where replenishment service levels and/or promotions can be defined, monitored, and evaluated in close coordination with regional and store management. How about custom regional offerings for valued customers that are enabled by connecting the private cloud to ecommerce platforms. The local control and flexibility of using a cloud approach can open up tremendous opportunity for improving store performance.

Essential Guidance

Cloud standards and vendor offerings remain fairly nascent and there may be some risk to moving to fast (anyone remember Linux base POS?). However, the self-funding, high function nature of this technology once mature dictates that retailers should have an internal position paper prepared that includes a vision of how the approach may be utilized for competitive advantage. Global Retail Insights also recommends incubating the technology by undertaking some proof-of-concept projects. As always, the GRI team is available to support your efforts with relevant research and advice.