Thursday, May 28, 2009

Conversational Corporation Roundtable Wrap-Up

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Yesterday afternoon i had the privilege to moderate a panel discussion with David Meerman Scott, Marketing Strategist, Keynote Speaker, and Author of World Wide Rave; Shel Israel, Best selling author of Naked Conversations and the upcoming book Twitterville and David Spark, Tech Journalist and Founder of Spark Media Solutions as well as about 15 attendees from different verticals, job roles and levels of participation in the use of social media.

David Libby, one of the attendees has a detailed posted based on the notes he took that provides an excellent overview of the discussions that took place. We also recorded the session via Ustream.tv, which i have embedded below.

The Roundtable discussion was a chance to learn from the attendees and the panelists what companies need to think about and how they need to approach being a 'Coversational Corporation'. The title comes from a recent ebook that i published with Shel Israel (one of the panelists), Robert Scoble and Greg Merkle called the The Conversational Corporation: How Social Media is Changing the Enterprise'.

I started off the discussion with introductions, asking the participants to tell us what they would like to get out of the discussion, the list was diverse and included:
  • How invested do we want to be from the start?
  • How do we work with our legal departments? (we had a good conversation about legal being very good at focusing on 'risk' and that we still have issues going to trial)
  • What are some of the non-traditional ways to do business using social networking
  • How do you bring it all together? (tools, messages, initiatives)
  • How do you stay ahead of your clients? (especially important for professional services providers)
  • Transcending Time-zones with social media for global companies and clients
  • Non-profit use of social media
  • Social Media-> how different is it from PR?
  • Using Social Media to coordinate and promote events
  • How to get your Salesforce into the conversation?
  • Things to keep in mind when thinking about using social media in a regulated industry
  • Focusing on the Story.....instead of the Tools!
I think we covered most of the questions that initially were put on the board and was pleased with both the pace and the participation of all the attendees.

To watch the video of the roundtable discussion, make sure you turn up the volume both on your PC as well as on the player below because some of the people in the back are sometimes hard to hear.



After the roundtable discussion and some drinks and appetizers out on the lovely sunny patio we got to take the participants on a tour of the Palo Alto Wall Street Journal printing plant which is always a treat!

A big thank you to all the attendees, panelists and internal Dow Jones people that made this event happen!
More photos from the event can be found here.

Sunday, May 17, 2009

VRM and Request for Taking Control of My Purchasing Power

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Yesterday I attended the VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) Workshop in Palo Alto. The workshop sessions were great and i left even more excited and invigorated about the possibility and opportunities with the concept of VRM for consumers and the marketplace in general.

One of the session topics was the Personal 'RFP' (Request For Proposal). I have been keeping an eye on the VRM conversation for a while and Personal RFPs is a topic that comes up often as a concept, so i was excited that Doc Searls was leading a session on the topic.

An early post from 2007 on the subject from an active participant in the VRM project Keith Hopper defines the Personal RFP as follows which i think it a good summary of our discussion yesterday:
The idea is simple: have the individual consumer dictate what they want and at what price. Let the vendors who can match this need come to them rather than the other way around. Product marketers currently have an annoying habit of telling us what we need and then inundating us with a sea of unsolicited communications around products we may not want. Removing this vendor behavior would reduce an unwanted advertising burden on the consumer (annoyance) as well as on the marketer (cost). This should decrease total unit costs, and by extension the cost to the consumer.

The idea of the 'Personal RFP' is to have an outbound channel (and we spent time in other sessions at the workshop defining some of those possible channels) that would allow the consumer to explicitly announce to Vendors what they are looking to buy. A simple statement such as:

I want ____ in ___(city,Lat/Long) between___&___(day&time) for $___.

During the session we discussed the different purchasing needs of a consumer- for example when buying a car, you may have a long list of specifics (i want a car that gets more then x miles per gallon, have X cylinders, leather interior, 3 yr warranty, etc.) or something more more simple which might not be as affected but product details (i want Linseed oil).

A consumer may also be at a different point in their purchasing decision- they can be looking for a camera and have done no research on what they need and therefore would put a very generalized statement ' I want a digital Camera in San Francisco by the end of the month for no more then US$250.00' or they have a specific camera model in mind 'I want a Canon EOS 5D Mark II with a Car Battery Charger CBC-E6 in San Francisco by Friday May 22th for US$2,550'.

So during the discussion we spent some time talking about the different types of 'requests' that a consumer could possibly want to make of their vendors. Much like in a corporate enterprise 'RFP' process (which over the years btw i have answered hundreds of!!) there could be different types of requests based on where the 'buyer' is such as:

Request for Information- e.g. i would define this as a high level request for information from a vendor to understand what they offer, this could lead to a customized landing page for the consumer for example with the vendor's products
Request for Quotation - e.g. i would define this as providing price points for a specific product that the consumer knows they want- this could lead to a custom page that present a customized 'coupon' for that specific product for that consumer for a limited time
Request for Proposal- e.g. i would define this as the consumer defining their needs in detail based on their intended use of the product and having the vendor identify solutions that would meet those needs and help guide the consumer to buying the product that fits their needs.

One of the things that popped into my head that i certainly would want to make sure this process would avoid would be a 'Request for Spam' (although i realize that some consumers may actually enjoy shopping that way- all about choices!)

There of course would probably be other types of 'Requests' as VRM services are made available in the marketplace to consumers and during the day we discussed some of those models that are being worked on by project members. Workshop Notes will be posted on the wiki.

If you are interested in the topic as it continues to mature and become a reality (and trust me based on the workshop we will be seeing some real life example of VRM in action soon) please poke around on the Project VRM wiki and/or subscribe to the ProjectVRM Blog.

Image|Flickr|CarySkelton's photos|Why? Well the obvious message of the Kinks song titled 'You Really Got Me' but also that Bruce has been taking audience song requests that create this type of view in the front of the stage- personal requests for songs!

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Real Life Twitter

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Lately my husband, in an attempt to obviously connect with me more over my Twittering habit has taken to yelling things out loud in a monotone voice like 'starting to make dinner by myself. lol' from the other room to get my attention away from the computer or 'OMG i just found the best shoes. and on sale!' when i pickup a new pair.

So of course, I just laughed hysterically as i watched this clip- on what would happen if the way we communicate on Twitter was the way we communicated in real life.


Hey at least we would talk to one another more- even if it was uni-directional!

Friday, May 08, 2009

Copyright Through the Ages

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This week at the CODIE awards dinner for SIIA (Software & Information Industry Association) we got a preview of their newest anti-piracy campaign video- an updated version of their 1992 'Don't Copy that Floppy' classic video that certainly had everyone in the room laughing (either because we remember seeing it, we all really miss floppies or because the rapping 'Digital Protector' is just too much!).

Copyright laws are not new, it is just that as media evolves it different characteristics and capabilities that would have been unimaginable (even in 1992 when the floppy copy was an issue!). So it was with great interest that i came across this site about Copyright History which is a digital archive of primary sources on copyright from the invention of the printing press (c. 1450) onwards.

From the Scout Report Summary where i found the reference:
This website, initially funded by the United Kingdom Arts and Humanities Council, uses primary source material from Italy, France, Germany, the UK, and the United States to trace the beginnings of copyright. For each of these geographical zones/jurisdictions, a national editor was responsible for "selecting, sourcing, transcribing, translating and commenting documents." Documents found here include "privileges, statutes, judicial decisions, contracts and materials relating to legislative history, but also contemporary letters, essays, treatises and artefacts." To get visitors oriented to the immense topic at hand, a compact interactive timeline has been provided. At the bottom of the page visitors should click on "The Timeline Interface" to view the full timeline. Moving the gray vertical bar over each 50 year time segment will show all the copyrights for that 50 year period. A high arc in the time period indicates a lot of activity for that time segment. There are colored dots to indicate the country the material is from, and rolling the mouse over each dot will reveal the full record. The site is loaded with information, and various ways to search for material. Searching by "date" and "place" is one way to search. See the menu on the left side of the page to see the available search and browse options, such as "country", "original language", "person", and "place".

Tuesday, May 05, 2009

The Conversational Corporation How Social Media is Changing the Enterprise

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If you are a longtime reader of my blog, you know that i have been writing about the intersection of consumer information tools and the enterprise since early 2006 and that the topic is one that is very dear to my heart- so i am very pleased to annouce this new ebook today.

Although it seems like only yesterday, it was in early winter of 2007 that the title of our new ebook 'The Conversational Corporation' came to mind based on an on-site visit to Sun Microsystems with Robert Scoble, Greg Merkle and myself, three of the four authors of our newest ebook 'The Conversational Corporation: How Social Media is Changing the Enterprise'. The fourth author Shel Israel was brought in later on when Robert suggested that we use this ebook as a follow-up to their Naked Conversations book published in 2006 that was focused on Social Media, especially blogging for mostly a corporate audience (and what a difference it made in corporate blogging- i know i personally gave over 20 customers copies!!). In addition to the previous collaborations with Robert, Shel had also been doing a lot of work with Enterprise companies and had interviewed more than 300 people in 38 countries on social media’s impact on culture and business that we were lucky enough to leverage for this ebook.

In the ebook which is available for free download, we look at ways that corporate employees are communicating and collaborating, and we discuss their impact on the 'Corporation'—particularly on the changing expectations of customers and employees. I am a believer that there is a very true intersection between business and social media in today's enterprise employee toolkit that is needed for their day to day work and i think that the ebook does a good job of outlining some of these opportunities.

Out of that session (the image is from the whiteboard that day), Robert's “Starfish Approach” is covered and it is a concept that i have been sharing with customers that certainly resonates with them as they begin to put together an information strategy that uses multiple tools : “...like a starfish, your organization should be able to grow, adapt and even abandon new tools (“legs”) without threatening the health of the larger organism”.

The ebook took a while to publish due to various issues (mostly time constraints on 4 plus people's schedules!) and even this weekend as I reviewed the final version there are many things that i would have liked to add which i will cover here on this blog in the upcoming weeks. The original idea was to do a themed design like my 'Folksonomies and Taxonomies in the Enterprise' ebook, the layout for this ebook however is simple- but hopefully you find the content and the ideas we explore useful and valuable enough to 'start' the conversation about how you can create a "Conversational Corporation' within your own companies.

We look forward to your thoughts and ideas on how to enable and drive a 'Conversational Corporation'- Enjoy!

Additional photos from the session (thanks to Carolyn Flynn) can be seen here.