Enterprise Web 2.0: Harnessing Collective Intelligence
Posted by Ahmad Barirani in 
This McKinsey study, surveys about how businesses are using the Web 2.0 as tools to increase their productivity. As it can be shown in the figure below, web services are widely adopted throughout the industry. However, an interesting finding of the survey is the importance of tools design to support the collective intelligence of the firm. Indeed, social networks are increasingly being seen as places where knowledge can be shared and stored. For businesses that are facing constant change in their environment, it is increasingly important to keep records of the knowledge produced by its employees, but also to keep record of the problem solving context in which they happened. Social networking tools have the great advantage of acting like the memory of an organization by recording dialogues between employees when facing a problem and finding solutions.
The Tweet Watch Made it to the Final Round of entrepreneurship contest
Nothing is more enjoyable than reward after hard work. Our portfolio project, The Tweet Watch, has been selected for the final round of the HEC-POLY-UdeM Entrepreneurship Contest. The great thing with this contest is that each team gets assigned to a startup coach. Coaches are very involved and well connected in the Montreal startup community. This gives them valuable knowledge about how things need to get done when starting a company. Of course, they have a lot of experience as they have seen many startup ideas and watched them grow (and fail) over the years. Their comments and advices are priceless. It’s just such an opportunity to work with them.
S&P Performance Againt NASDAQ: Technology is Good!
One of the most traumatizing experiences for many people was the 2000 Internet bubble burst. Savings were lost and might never be recovered. Since then, everything technology is looked at with suspicious eyes. When entrepreneurs boast for high rates of return, it is almost perceived as attempted robbery. I wondered how rational these reactions towards technology are. Let’s take a look at market growth since 1995 for the tree main stock market indexes: S&P, Dow Jones and NASDAQ.
Funny thing: S&P performance isn’t doing as good as NASDAQ. For the last 15 year, S&P value doubled while NASDAQ is worth 2.3 times more! So a dollar invested in technology would have returned more, even if taking into account the big crash of 2000. Even more impressive, if we look at charts after 2005:
We can see that NASDAQ is the only index that represents any gains. S&P performance is actually negative meaning that traditional big companies represent a loss for investors.
I guess it’s about time we recognize the importance of technology in our economy. Public policies and industrial trends should be aligned with the broader goal of developing technological capabilities. Public policies such as the promotion of science and technology, investment in research projects, tax returns for entrepreneurs would be very helpful for developing technological strength of our economy. Industry managers should also switch focus to more collaborative and open environments is also a must for building competitive networks and clusters.
Tracking Retweets: A Brief Look Inside Twitter Conversations
I tracked a sample of 60k+ retweets. After removing some of the common words used in English language (like ‘the’) and some of those short words used a lot of tweets (like ‘lmao’), I came up with the following tag cloud of those retweets:
It’s interesting to see that that Apple owns the twittosphere as both ‘Apple’ and ‘iPad’ are common words appearing in retweets. Facebook is also mentioned a lot. Could it mean that Twitter and Facebook users are kind of the same people?
Something stroke me: the word robot. I guess this is growing concern among Twitter users since automatic applications are increasingly annoying people.
I also noticed that people talk a lot about news and guess who…Obama! After all. Twitter is not just pointless babble.
Internet, Social Media and Consumer Shopping Behavior
One area in which the Internet has no rival is in the dissemination of information. Consumers have learned to to use this tool when shopping for things. An interesting trend these days is that people use the Internet as a source of information about local products or services. This is a real change in consumer behavior and is really not so intuitive from traditional marketing point of view. Indeed, it was long thought that people trust other people more when they are physically close to them. We now see that people use different sources on the Internet before they take a decision about local business. It is as if the opinion of those people we don’t know also matters when it comes to assessing local businesses.
With the web 2.0 and social media, the scope of Internet has extended to the dissemination of knowledge, emotions and personal experiences. Web 2.0 means that people aren’t only performing searches anymore. They are actually communicating because the read/write feature of web 2.0 now enable users to share their thoughts in interactive ways. This interactive communication isn’t quite as effective as face-to-face communication, but it could be very close to for people who have similar ways of thinking. This similarity in taste, thoughts and personal experiences are actually a key point that make social media so powerful. Similarity in different areas compensates for physical distance. People are not bound to be face-to-face to communication anymore. If their life experiences are similar enough, they will be able to understand each other through social media. So let’s see
Surveys show that social media have a strong impact on shopping decision. Here, we can see that people ‘find’ each other through brands. Their liking or disliking of a brand is actually something they are similar about. So those who adopt certain technologies like to be in touch with other people who use those same technologies so they can share their personal experiences and knowledge about the technology. What’s more important is that future decisions about a brand are going to be more likely influenced by those who initially shared the same attitude. This has a great impact in terms of customer retention and loyalty. Social media act like consumer unions. A bad review from the community means boycott of the product or brand. One thing social media marketers need to do is monitor what is being said about the brand so they can intervene when public opinions is trending towards the negative. The good thing is that social media leaves traces. Everything is written and is more or less open depending on the platform.
A common place for consumers to ‘hang’ are Facebook fan pages. Facebook pages are where people meet and discuss about all kinds of stuff that don’t always have to do with the product or service. However, they hint about their favorite brand by giving subtle clues of what they are using or going to buy. These clues are not always conscious and could be the result of new urban expressions such as ‘Googling’. Something important to remember here is the principle of consistency where people tend to make take action in line with earlier actions. That’s why when a consumer becomes a Facebook fan for a product, he or she is likely to purchase the product. It’s like the person has an internal conversation that goes something like this: “I am a fan of product XYZ. I will buy product XYZ because I am a fan of product XYZ.”
So the recommendation goes for businesses to set Facebook fan pages and push people to become fans. Since they will have to be consistent with themselves, they are going to adopt the brand or product. Isn’t that great, Creating business only with creating a Facebook fan page? Of course things are not that easy and the real difficulty is in getting people to become fans in the first place. For entrepreneurs, it means using all the networking firepower in your hands to get as much people to use the product. The point here is that great effort should be spent on selling the fan page more than the product itself!
Social Media Marketing and Local Search Top Priorities For Ecommerce Industry
With widespread use of social media by consumers, businesses are increasingly aware of its importance. Compared to a year ago, marketers feel like social media spending should take a larger share of total marketing budget. In five years, close to a fifth of marketing operations will be done one social platforms. My opinion is that this projection is pessimistic as the Internet industry still hasn’t defined a real ecosystem around social media. With semantic web or web 3.0 expected to play a stronger role in the next three to five years, we could very well see more important surge in social media marketing. The fact that there is popular doubt around near to mid future economic prospects, it is normal that forecast be more conservative when it comes to integrating new marketing channels.
Retailers believe that social media is a great way to keep in touch with customers. Videos, customer reviews, blogs and personalization are the most important features retailers went for in 2009. What is happening in my opinion is that businesses are finding new ways to offer an alternative buying experience to offline purchasing. These aren’t things associated with customers saving money or time because of online purchase, but are more related to the pleasure of interacting with the media which can be somehow different and joyful compared to the pleasure of interacting with a salesperson. For instance, a well designed promotional video will be able to create a totally different feeling from that of a salesman pitching in a store. This channel can, by itself, offer new sales opportunities that couldn’t have been realized otherwise. I also believe that this sector is going to know serious transformations as retailers find new ways to arouse customer feelings. Somehow, consumers are looking for new ways to have pleasure in buying. Buying is becoming an increasingly personal experience and the increasing need for interaction between customers and suppliers is there and is real. Therefore, expect greater role of interactive media in online retailers in the years to come.
Of course, interactive media is closely related to social media as a tool for viral propagation of new experiences. Social media have proven to be effective in creating brand awareness through word-of-mouth. Therefore, promotional messages are no more communicated exclusively through the firm’s website. Messages will propagate through social networks and will have a more subtle association with the brand by itself. Again, the point here is to confer a new experience to the customer who is approached even when doing the very act of socializing.
In line with this philosophy of multichannel sales, retailers have spent considerable effort in redesigning their websites. This is an attempt to generate more sales and to acquire new customers. It shows that there is strong consensus around the importance of customer experience and online sales as e-commerce companies try to use cutting edge techniques to stimulate new feeling in customers. These methods have shown to be quite fruitful as last year online sales results show that more people are spending online.
Finally, local search has also gained in importance. Business have shown interest in having a better presence on online maps. Of course, this has to do with a) higher rate of online traffic coming from mobile devices, and b) a change in customer behavior when it comes to searching for services.
The change in customer behavior is very related to the concept of economic gains associated with online purchasing. If it is true that, due to increasing returns of scale, online retailer can offer the same product for cheaper than offline retailers, the opposite is true for services which have a very geographical nature. With customers looking for services in their proximity, it becomes essential for business to have a presence on all location-based services.
My view is that these statistics are showing a trend where the Internet and especially social media are supplanting traditional media.
Local SEO Starter Kit
With widespread adoption of smatphones and mobile Internet, local search engine optimization has gained in importance. While a lot of techniques used for regular SEO still hold for local SEO, a few other things need to be considered for better results. In this post, I tried to conduct a survey of the most basic techniques regarding local SEO.
Location-aware services
The first thing to consider is that local SEO is not only about search engines: it is also about maps and other location-aware web applications. Think of integrating with Google Maps (including Place Pages), Bing Maps and Yahoo Local but also a whole bunch of local business listings and 411-like services like Yelp, Canada 411, Superpages, FourSquare and Gowalla.
One way crawlers relate webpages to locations, is through the address. So your address should appear in a couple of pages (ex: Contact and About) in a consistent way so the crawler ‘has enough evidence’ that it is your address. Use a standard format like the following:
Company name
Street Address
City,State/Province,Zip/Postal
Phone WITH AREA CODE
Part of your local SEO task is to make sure your website is registered with your company address. This is because search engines give some importance to the registrar’s address. If it is the same as the address that shows in your website, then there ‘is a match for the crawler’.
The usual SEO stuff
Your title, description and H-tags are still very importance in local SEO. The difference is that you should have location or city information in them. In other words, what you are saying to the crawler is that “this page is about this business that does thins thing in this city”.
We all know about the importance of backlinks and how to get them. When it comes to local SEO, your backlinks should contain location information in anchor text for better results. This is the same logic as for tags inside your webpages.
Consumers Willing to Pay For Online Content
It wasn’t long ago when Variety.com announced their decision to charge fees for some of their content. Recently, a survey conducted by Nielsen Wired shows that consumers are willing to pay for online content. Most interesting of all are findings about social communities and blogs where 28% and 20% of consumers have paid or would consider paying for those types of content respectively. Taking into consideration that the public doesn’t always understand the value of social media, this is an interesting finding indeed.
It all looks like people are willing to spend more than just their ISP subscription fees. In fact, 2009 has seen a rise in e-commerce spending compared to 2008 which was a better economic year. What it means is that people see their Internet connection the same way as they see gas for their car: it will get them to the store, but you still have to pay for a product. This is good news as the potential of e-commerce are great and will have beneficial effect to other sectors of the economy.
With E-Commerce Still On The Rise, Expect More Investment In EMarketing
According to ComScore, Holiday shopping was 5% on the rise for 2009. Taking into account that 2009 wasn’t really a good year for the economy, it is great news for the e-commerce industry and an indication of future trends to come in terms of consumer behavior. In my opinion, time saving is the most important benefit offered by online shopping. Of course, people save money when they buy a book from Amazon.com, but they save time which might be more important that the money they’ll be saving.
As a result of this new reality, brick and mortar SMBs that haven’t started with having an online shop should be seriously thinking of doing so. Of course, there is one thing that a brick and mortar stores can do that an website will not be able to do: human contact. But except a decrease in the number of customers who can ‘afford’ to spend on such ‘luxury’ as human contact. Therefore, businesses should think of having a virtual store as well as their physical store to stay competitive in today’s fast moving market.
Facebook Number One For Christmas
Facebook got more traffic than Google for Christmas. I guess this is the best gift they could have dreamed for. This is somehow normal if we take into consideration that 1) Facebook has more than 300 million members, that 2) people keep more in touch with friends and family during Christmas. Of course, this is to be expected for special holidays where people spend more time sending each other good wishes. However, I believe there is more in this news than just something related to special holidays.
First of all, Facebook is not going to lose members. Therefore, the critical mass that is needed to become number one website is there to stay and will only get bigger. Second, certain features of Facebook offer benefits that other conventional means of communication do not offer. Therefore, Facebook is changing the way people keep in touch with each other, gradually supplanting traditional communication channels in the process.
So if Facebook will have more users who will spend more time on the website, then it will soon have more traffic than Google. This was somehow expected as major marketing analysts expect a rise of marketing spending on Facebook and other mainstream social media.
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