According to ABI Research analyst Zippy Aima, the enterprise is a unique creature with a need for its own form of social networking, separate from the consumer sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Aima, the analyst behind the report “Grown Up? White Label Social Networking Targeting the Enterprise,” says that although the “white-label market” — in which vendors create unbranded applications for use by a wide range of corporate users — is in its early stages when it comes to social networking, the potential demand is high: ABI forecasts that the market will be worth nearly $1.3 billion in 2013.

Educating executives and employees about how enterprise social networking can provide value and enhance their jobs is a chore that many enterprises are beginning to face. Aima points out that white-label social networking for the enterprise not only helps enterprise employees to connect with one another, but also aids in dealings with customers, partners, and suppliers.

Aima says that the primary challenge for white-label networking vendors and for enterprises will be revving up adoption. Sure, users may be familiar with platforms such as Facebook, but applying social networking to business processes may be a new concept for some. The novelty may soon be wearing off: Many social-networking platform providers — and CRM vendors, for that matter — are beginning to embed social-networking features into business applications, continually blurring the line between personal and professional social networking.

It’s hard to say just how social networking will play out over the next couple of years, but one thing is for certain: The momentum is not slowing. Aima agrees that white-label social networking for the enterprise market is very new. However, she maintains that the demand will only increase over the next five years.

With the white-label social-networking providers popping up only within the past year or two, how should an enterprise go about choosing one provider over another? Aima recommends thinking, first and foremost, about which business solutions the social-networking features would be used for.

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The most widely-used open-source software packages are exposing businesses to significant and unnecessary risk, according to Fortify.

In its Open Source Security Study, which examined 11 of the most common Java open source packages, Fortify claimed that open-source software development communities were not working securely and leaving dangerous vulnerabilities unaddressed.

The packages tested included application server, customer relationship management (CRM), web application and content management system (CMS) projects. Most did not have documentation covering security, an email for users to report vulnerabilities, or easy access to internal experts to discuss security issues. Also, in every project analysed, there were security issues that weren’t addressed.

The survey showed that most open source communities did not follow business-level control standards, and that there was a hidden cost for companies using open source as they had to test and patch for unanticipated security bugs.

Howard A. Schmidt, a former cyber security officer to the White House, said that open-source software was valuable, but needed to be a point of concern for chief information officers who depended on it to run their business.

Fortify recommended that government and commercial organisations which use open source do so with great caution, and that open source communities needed to raise security awareness as well as adopt commercial security practices from the commercial world.

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People Engage More With Small, Branded, Well-Lit Communities!

According to Communispace, in this new era of “conversational marketing”, the measure for engagement in a community isn’t the number of people logging on. Rather, it’s how actively people participate in the community.

New Communispace research, which analyzed participation behavior among 26,539 members of 66 private online communities, provides an initial look at member participation in communities.

The study evaluated communities along three participation metrics:

• Frequency - how often members contribute
• Volume - the number of contributions made by each member
• Bystander or “lurker” rate - what percentage of members are simply observing versus actively participating.

Key findings of the research are:

The more intimate the community, the more people participate -

• 86 percent of the people who log on to private, facilitated communities (average community size: 300-500 people) made contributions.
• Only 14 percent merely logged in and observed, or “lurked.”
• In contrast, on public social networking websites, blogs, and message boards, this ratio is typically reversed, i.e., the vast majority of site visitors do not contribute. In fact, in a typical online forum (e.g., wiki, community, message board or blog), one percent of site visitors contribute and the other 99 percent lurk.

People get more involved when they know whom they are talking to and why -

• Branded sites showed a higher volume of participation.
• When potential members were considering whether to participate in a community, they were 30 percent more likely to log on when the welcome notice disclosed the company sponsoring the community. Branded sites had an initial log in rate of 71 percent, compared with 55 percent for unbranded sites. This suggests that transparency - being upfront about who’s behind the community - is a key factor for companies that want to engage with customers in a community.

Why people participate: social glue, shared passion, having a voice -

• Communities of parents get the highest involvementDifferences between how men and women participate: based on analysis of single-sex communities, the research found that although members of women’s communities participated more frequently than men, men seemed to have more to say when they did participate: 4.8 weekly contributions for men compared to 4.1 for the women.
• Homogeneity triggers participation
• Education and household income were not related to community member participation
• Having a voice, productive leisure: One of the implications from the research is that people may get more involved in private, intimate communities because they feel like they can have a say.Another implication is that people may view the time spent as “productive leisure.”  They see participating as an interesting or fun outlet for communicating with other people who love what they love.

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It’s hard to resist the easy option. Buy this customer relationship management (CRM) software, and you will efficiently and cost-effectively be able to manage your customer relationships. Buy this content management software, and you will be able to efficiently and cost-effectively manage your content.

Software does not manage. People manage. Software is a tool that can help you manage better, but it is not a manager. It is not strategic. Before you can manage customer relationships, you have to have relationships with your customers.

A person recently told me that their CRM software was great for sending lots to email offers and other marketing material to their customers. To them, this was what CRM was all about: cost-effectively deluging (spamming) their customers with marketing and sales pitches.

It amazes me the amount of organizations out there that still believe that to create a better intranet or public website, all they need to do is choose the right content management software. These organizations are not thinking about the quality and effectiveness of the content. They’ll employ junior people to put up this content, and then a couple of years later they’ll wonder where it all went wrong.

I’ve yet to meet an organization that has successfully implemented personalization either for their intranet or their public website. This is not because the concept of personalization is wrong. Properly implemented, it is a very sophisticated and powerful way to give customers what they want.

There are many reasons it fails miserably, however. One of them is that organizations feel that all they need to do is install this fancy software, turn it on, and, hey presto, a wonderful website emerges. No need to worry about the quality of the content. No need to worry about how well it is structured and organized. The magic software looks after all that.

I once spoke with a consultant who told me about working with the British military. Years ago, if you were becoming an officer, you were sent on a course about managing your office. Part of the course involved learning how to manage your filing cabinet.

Then computers came along and the course was scrapped. Think about it. A computer has at least 100 “filing cabinets”. You need training in managing content far more if you have a computer. But you don’t get it because of this irrational exuberance about what technology can do.

Modern organizations are not professionally managing their content. Senior management often abdicate responsibility. They think that the Web is a technology challenge that they can hand over to IT.

Content management will become one of the key management skills of the 21st century. That’s because we live in a content-driven world.

Technology can support strategy. It can support managers as they do their jobs. But technology is not a strategy, and it is certainly not management.

Amen! For other interesting news and commentary, check out the WebProNews site.

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Blogs, Wikis, Forums Sway Consumer Opinion, Research Shows, an article written by Laurie Sullivan for TechWeb, notes the following:

The growing phenomenon of consumer-generated content has become disruptive to online businesses, but many are studying the reviews, finding ways to use the content to their advantage, the (JupiterResearch) report says.
The research found 77 percent of online shoppers read consumer product reviews and ratings. Viewers were found to be increasingly loyal to the stores that featured product feedback. Another survey determined that 22 percent of online consumers who posted feedback on forums tend to purchase more online.
Content created through the voice of the consumer is reinventing advertising. “It’s shifting the power away from Madison Avenue and into consumers’ hands,” said Neil Sequeira, principal at General Catalysts Partners, a one billion dollar early stage venture capital firm. “Users create content they are passionate about. If there’s a surfboard you love, why not create some content around it.”
And more sites are popping up to populate the fields. Launched late Sunday, Wiki.com joins a list of do-it-yourself sites like Jotspot and Wikia that allow anyone to add and edit content on a specific topic. Wiki.com CEO John Gotts said consumers can register for a sub-domain on the site, while granting permission to others either to add or edit content.

MindTouch co-founder and COO Aaron Fulkerson said a team of engineers put together Wiki.com’s backend in about 48 hours, from the time Gotts signed the contract, to taking the site live.
“Company names and verticals are being registered at wiki.com for people to air their opinion about a specific topic or product,” Fulkerson said. “When I do a search on Google for company XYZ, and suddenly in the top ten results are opinions from user-generated content sites that can sway my opinion of the company.”
Wiki.com runs on a service oriented distributed architecture (SODA), technology developed by MindTouch, a San Deigo wiki-software and hardware startup founded by former Microsoft employees. The company in July launched the first commercial open-source wiki based on open standards.
Sam Rogoway no longer reads product reviews. Instead, he spends time researching topics on wikis and social networks. So last week, the entertainment lawyer launched the travel wiki site Tripmates Inc., along with co-founder Emily Dahlberg.
“The days of reading some review from an expert is dwindling because people want to obtain their information from other users,” Rogoway said. “If the social network is built around the topic, travel or cars for example, you can link to the person’s profile who wrote the review to see if their likes and dislikes are similar to yours,” Rogoway said.
JupiterResearch analyst Diane Clarkson wrote in a report that recommendations from family and friends are among online travel researchers’ most used resources, but lifestyle descriptions of content contributors are important, too.
Not all agree that blogs, wikis and forums are the most important communication tools, ever. JupiterResearch advertising analyst Emily Riley said word of mouth, defined as online conversations, between two people that know each other is the most trustworthy method to gain information, but “it’s losing trust because many strangers are entering the conversation,” she said. “Word of mouth online, when it’s within a company’s Web site, is considered more trustworthy than considered on a random blog.”

For more, see the source article.

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Thanks to Vinnie Mirchandani, I was able to find the: Top 10 Applications for an Enterprise Wiki.

Here’s the list of the top 10, for more detail on each, check out the source post:

1. Sales Support
2. Project Communication
3. Informal Learning
4. Application Support
5. Channel Communications
6. Non-profits
7. Intranets
8. Market Research
9. Product Planning
10. Customer Service

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In Taking a business-centric approach to portals the following is noted:

Enterprise portals (generally known as just ‘portals’) rose to prominence several years ago. Complementing or replacing earlier technologies, portals promise to deliver a more coherent information management platform, and a more seamless user experience for staff.
Now that the early hype has died down, it is not surprising to find that portals are not a ’silver bullet’ solution to all the information delivery challenges within organisations.
Like all technologies, portals have their strengths and weaknesses. These need to be well understood if they are to be successfully implemented within businesses.
This article outlines the characteristics (good and bad) of enterprise portals, and proposes a business-centric approach to selecting and implementing portals.

This is an excellent article on a once very hot topic. Since many CRM solutions now include “Dashboard” home pages that are essentially a portal for the underlying data detail, most of what is disciussed here can also be applied to the design, creation and management of user dashboards.

Here’s the conclusion of the article:

There is a clear need to deliver better information management solutions for users and for the business as a whole. The existing mess of overlapping (or even competing) information systems with most organisations must be addressed and resolved.
Enterprise portals may be able to assist with resolving these issues. If they are to succeed, however, organisations must be fully aware of both their strengths and weaknesses (just like any technology).
Most importantly, these projects must be driven by clear staff and organisational needs, as well as a clear vision of the user experience that must be delivered.
Where portal projects are driven solely by IT considerations, they will fail. They do not offer a ’silver bullet’, nor will they eliminate the need to better manage the underlying information.
By taking a business-focused (and user-centric) approach to portal projects, organisations can take valuable steps towards the goal of providing a single information environment for staff.

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In Adoption: RSS: Field Sales Use Case Charlie notes that:

Field sales reps are experts at using technology to stay on top of their markets, customers, and competitors. Enterprise RSS provides a powerful new tool for these road warriors.

Field-based sales reps are responsible for keeping current on a flood of constantly changing information from a wide array of sources. But the very fact that these mobile reps spend so much of their time out of the office means that they are often hours or days behind. A single sales rep who misses a critical update to the corporate price list or a strategic announcement by a prospect or competitor can have an instant and adverse material impact on a company’s top line.
To help their mobile sales forces stay productive, most companies have invested in the infrastructure of mobile data delivery—laptops, PDAs, cellphones, and BlackBerrys. But infrastructure is not enough. What remains missing is an application to track the constant stream of information a mobile sales force depends on, including:

• current product information, price lists, presentations, competitive information, positioning papers, and data sheets from sales enablement and product marketing personnel at corporate headquarters
• updates to outstanding customer support issues, critical situation notifications, consulting engagement status reports, and license renewal reminders from internal corporate systems
• breaking news, corporate financial results, and govenmental filings regarding prospects, customers, and competitors from external data sources
• best practices, win-loss reports, anecdotal information, contacts, and “watercooler talk” from peers

Such an application can be found in an Enterprise RSS system that continously aggregates information from a wide varierty of sources (including people, automated systems, and information feeds), provides a management interface to let adminstrators and users specify which information gets routed to whom and how, and pushes that information directly to users’ desktops and handheld devices. To enable information sharing among peers, the system should also provide its users the ability to publish their own feeds.

And in Adoption: RSS: Marketing Use Case Charlie notes that:

I recently spoke with a marketing director at a multibillion dollar semiconductor manufacturer who had just spent a year and $1 million on an integrated portal/content management system. As it turns out, what she really needed was Enterprise RSS.

The company she works for is a $2 billion semiconductor manufacturer that markets its products to design engineers creating new industrial, communication, computer, and consumer products. The company sells its products through an extensive network of distributors. Both customers and distributors need access to updated information about the company’s products, and since the commonditization curve for these products is very steep, the sooner the information gets into the customers’ hands, the higher the margin on the sale will be.
Last year, the company made a large investment in building a customer portal to make sure that the latest product information was always availble.

They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on software, and that much again on professional services, to implement a fully personalized site that allowed customers and distibutors to create custom pages for themselves containing information on the types of products in which they were interested. But even though the company built it, no one came. As it turns out, their audience didn’t want to constantly check the web, even a personalized site, for sporadically updated information. They wanted notifications.
So the company spent more time and money building out an elaborate system to email users with notifications of new products, with links back to the personalized site. But users in North America, fatigued by unwanted commercial email, mostly opted not to provide their email addresses. Sales of the company’s newest, highest-margin products languished while customers and distributors remained unaware of their existence.

When I spoke to the marketing director, she told me that what her company needs is a way to allow users to subscribe to personalized information updates without using the overburdened email channel. She had heard of “blogs”, but associated them with politics, and didn’t know anything about RSS.I described a system to her in which she could use the content management system they owned to publish product information to the web, and with a slight addition could also publish the same information to a number of RSS feeds, one for each product category. Links from her site would let her audience subscribe to the product categories in which they were interested, effectively allowing each user to personalize his own notifications. Then when new products were released, users would receive notifications without ever having to divulge their email addresses. She said that was exactly what she wanted and asked how long it would take. Not how much it would cost, just how long it would take. Not long, I told her.

Is it any wonder the CMS and portal guys are so quiet about RSS?

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This article focuses on the benefits that blogs are offering to people looking for insightful information that will help them to make more informed business decisions. It also addresses the burgeoning array of blog directories and newsreaders (software for automatically gathering and presenting new content posted to your favorite webblogs).

Blogs work because people have something to say and others find what they say valuable. Our business culture works the same way — it runs on the currency of influence, authority, and relationships. People who have strong and well-informed opinions command respect and become influencers; they win deals, drive decisions, and ultimately determine the fate of companies. The thirst for high-end business information — the kind that makes people feel like influencers — has created a $15 billion professional publishing market in the United States alone.
So here’s my prediction: Blogs will soon become a staple in the information diet of every serious businessperson, not because it’s cool to read them, but because those who don’t read them will fail. In short, blogs offer an accelerated and efficient approach to acquiring and understanding the kind of information all of us need to make business decisions.

I’ve recently started using a newsreader, and after spending hours setting the damn thing up, my business life has changed forever.

Thanks to the combination of using a newsreader and plugging into a few good blogs (which then plug into more, and so on …), I’ve created a hot list of business-oriented information that doesn’t just rival my old information-gathering habits, it blows them away. Not only do I spend less time searching and more time learning, but I’ve also joined a challenging and diverse community of minds and business interests. Once you’re in this kind of web, you don’t leave it — you’d be out of the loop. And in business, being out of the loop means death.
Entrepreneurial outfits such as Bloglines, Daypop, Feedster, and Technorati are already finding ways to make blogs easier to use and bring them to the masses.

Here are a few more weblog directories and search engines worth checking out:

• Bloogz
• Syndic8
• Waypath
• Eatonweb

Also, two professionally developed, very easy to use newsreaders that I would recommend that you consider are FeedDemon (which I use and love) and NewsGator (which integrates into MS-Outlook).Blogs Bubble Into Business

This article focuses on how weblog software is beginning to move into corporate use as a collaboration and knowledge management tool.

Weblogs give people a self-service way to find out what’s happening within the company, says Greg Lloyd, President of Traction Software, Inc.

Using blogs, companies can easily and quickly communicate information such as project updates, research, and product and industry news both inside and outside the business.
“I believe it is important to the CIO and the enterprise, because blogging introduces a new way to create, share and leverage knowledge in the enterprise,” says John Patrick, President of Attitude LLC.

According to Jamie Lewis, an analyst at Burton Group, “blogging is like a lot of other collaborative tools — if the company is good about trying to encourage and generate cross-functional and interpersonal collaboration and communication, then it’s a good idea.”
While most corporations have knowledge management tools and corporate portals to organize internal data, they don’t have an effective way to deal with external information. A blog allows users to integrate internal and external information.

“With our software, you can add comments or questions on any paragraph you see,” he says. “So if someone in the sales organization sees something that a competitor has just announced, that salesperson can add a note under the paragraph that talks about the new product announcement and make it visible to members in the sales team or only visible to the people in the competitive intelligence group, who would then correlate it and send it throughout the organization.”

Also, be sure to check out the article’s sidebar: Why a Business Blog?
I’m a big believer in the value of weblogs for small and mid-sized enterprises. Weblog software is a fantastic tool for creating a dynamic, content-rich, collaborative external web site that will improve the experience that your customers have with your organization. And for internal use, it offers capabilities that are common to many content and knowledge management software solutions at a tiny fraction of the cost of these systems. Two of the best weblog software solutions out there are Moveable Type (and its associated ASP offering Type Pad) or the software I use for the CRM Mastery E-Journal, Radio Userland. If you haven’t seriously looked into using weblog software, now’s the time.

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A posting in the Column Two Weblog, Why personalization hasn’t worked, put me on to a recent report by Jupiter Research that has been getting a lot of press; “Beyond the Personalization Myth.”

First of all, what is personalization? According to SearchCIO.com definitions, personalization is:

The process of tailoring pages to individual users’ characteristics or preferences. Commonly used to enhance customer service or e-commerce sales, personalization is sometimes referred to as one-to-one marketing, because the enterprise’s Web page is tailored to specifically target each individual consumer.

Personalization in some ways harkens back to an earlier day, by making consumer relationships more closely tailored to the individual. If you’ve ever bought a book from Amazon, for example, the next time you visit they will - like a friendly and helpful sales clerk - greet you by name and tell you about products in stock that they think you might like (such as more books by the same author, or books purchased by other people who also bought the book that you purchased)….

Well, as noted in Report slams Web personalization:

Companies trying to get personal with their Web site visitors in hopes of increasing sales are wasting more money than they’re earning, warns a new report.

The Jupiter Research report assails the practice of Web site personalization as expensive and unproductive.

Personalize This, noted:

According to Jupiter Research, consumers seemed ambivalent to efforts by retailers to implement costly personalization tools. When asked which features would make them more likely to buy from a certain online store, the ability to customize a site or receive personalized offers or recommendations seemed of minor importance; only 4 percent and 14 percent, respectively, said it would influence their decision. In contrast, customers are more interested in site optimization: 37 percent cited optimized sites (quickly loading pages) as a reason to buy more often from a site, and 48 percent claimed easy navigation would be incentive to buy more often from a site.

Based on the inability to influence customer decisions, the high costs of implementation and low return on investment, Jupiter recommends that personalization initiatives not be a factor in a company’s further technology purchases. According to the report, for every intended benefit tied to a personalization-related agenda, site managers can choose from many other tactics to achieve the same goals, at far lower cost.

Finally, Gerry McGovern had the following interesting commentary in his Why personalization hasn’t worked article:

It is easy to understand why people turn to software to solve problems with content. You specify what you need. You buy and install it. And, hey presto … But content doesn’t work that way. Publishing quality content is a difficult, time-consuming task. It’s messy. It requires long-term planning, training, evangelism, promotion.

Most websites are very basic. The quality of the writing is average and sometimes awful. Text is presented in a way that makes it difficult to read. Navigation is confusing and the search process is often appalling.

The Jupiter report finds that personalized websites are four times more expensive to run. It also finds that personalized websites are twice as likely to attract visitors who will never pay for anything. Worse still, it finds that 25 percent of consumers actually avoid personalized websites because they fear that their personal information will be abused.

When I come to your website I want your view of how you will solve my problems. I want to get in and out quickly with as little effort as possible. How do you keep me happy? Simple.

Teach your staff how to write well. Design a layout that allows me to read easily. Spend time creating a navigation that is simple and intuitive. Fix your search engine. Get the basics right. Garbage in, garbage out. Do you want to pay four times more for personalized garbage?

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