Saturday, December 25, 2010

In 2010 people get the news online on par with newspapers: first time ever

According to eMarketer research, 2010 sees US consumers get the news, all demographics combined, online as much as on the radio or even more than through newspapers. This is a confirmed trend that I highlighted already some time ago, but it was at that time only for one demographic.
"As a news delivery vehicle, the internet is second only to television, according to the Pew Research Center. More than 90% of Americans use one or more sources to get their daily news, and the number of digital channels is growing. Pew found that, on a typical day, 44% of US adults got news through a digital channel, either online or via mobile internet, email, social networks or podcasts." -- eMarketer
Should you rethink your PR activity? Yes you can!

Here is now some more details about the behavior of the US population sliced by demographics:

 To publishers, digital publications taking advantage of our proliferating mobile devices are to be taken into account to survive or thrive.

“While the number of digital newspaper readers will continue to grow as digital devices proliferate, the number of print newspaper readers will remain flat or continue to drop.” eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report “The Digital News Audience: 24/7 Participation.”

And finally, let me share with you what role Twitter plays in this:


Happy Holidays

Happy holidays #in on Twitpic
Today in Trocadéro, Paris

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

e-commerce in the US is up 13.6% at $38.8B in Q3 2010 vs. Q3 2009, more than 2x of traditional sales

e-commerce is continuing its progression despite a poor economic environment. As this latest report from the US Department of Commerce shows:
"The third quarter 2010 e-commerce estimate increased 13.6 percent (±2.5%) from the third quarter of 2009 while total retail sales increased 6.0 percent (±0.5%) in the same period. E-commerce sales in the third quarter of 2010 accounted for 4.2 percent of total sales."
 e-commerce sales totaled $38.8B for Q3 2010, accounting for 4% of total US Sales. In 10 years, this proportion did quadruple (1.2% in 2001).

According to another research from DataMonitor, the global online retail sector grew 14.5% in 2009 to reach $348.6B! When considering North America accounts for 45.7% of this total, that's nearly $160B in NA alone, up 60% from my last inquiry in Jan 2007.

At the same time, for H1 2010 we're still growing on the internet at a pace of more than 2M+ new web users per week according to Internet World Stats, where Asia is leading the curve to over 825M users vs. NA 266M, but their penetration rate is still low 21,5% in Asia vs. 77% in NA.

e-commerce is going to just explode in Asia over the next few years and my prediction is it's going to be mobile first!

Friday, October 29, 2010

Social Media Increases Small-Business Exposure

Interesting research by American Express OPEN highlighted by emarketer this week showing that SMB in the US actually consider Social Media activity increases their business exposure. The Social Media usage is making progress as well:
"While just one in 10 business owners reported using social networking for marketing last year, 39% indicated they did in September 2010" -- eMarketer
Facebook seems to lead their with 27% using it, LinkedIn 9%, Twitter 8% and Blogging 5% are far behind. But resistance is still very present for SMBs, more than three in five reported not using social media at all, and the biggest reason they gave was that it did not apply to their industry.

We'll get there.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Social Media Revolution Video



This is a refresh of this very good video that provides factual data to make all of us aware of how fast Social Media and Web 2.0 waves are progressing in our daily life. I use very often this eye opener video in my presentations.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Why are so many things broken? Seth Godin talks about poor design

Why are so many things broken? In this entertaining talk - one of the favorites of Gel 2006 - gelconference.com/​c/​gel06.php

Seth Godin gives a tour of things poorly designed, the reasons why they are that way, and how to fix them.

Seth Godin at Gel 2006 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

Wednesday, September 08, 2010

The Thin Line Between Liking a Brand and Liking Its Social Marketing

Good article on Emarketer


While Facebook fans and Twitter followers are often out for deals, they also care about showing support for brands they love—but that might not be an invitation to be marketed to. What does a brand fan's self-expression mean for the kinds of messages marketers should push out? Full Article




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Web evolution? Web 3.0 and Web 4.0 predictions

I found this perspective on web evolution quite interesting. We know predictions are a dangerous sport, but thinking about this might inspire you.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Combining Email, Search, Social and PR for a Content Marketing Campaign: 6 Tactics to Generate Surge in Visitor Traffic


You know I'm a big believer in integrated marketing. Now that Social Media is making a surge in our marketing plans, I found this article on Marketing Sherpa interesting as it summarizes what we should do better:

"
Marketing teams often focus tactics and goals in a particular channel, overlooking how these channels can complement one another. With a bit of planning, a campaign can harness the strategic value of email, search, social media and other outlets for a single purpose. See how an online luggage retailer created a premium report based on a survey of e-newsletter subscribers and captured 5x more blog traffic.
"

Their blog traffic increased 518% Y/Y and additionnally the report’s landing page had a 16% lower bounce rate than the site’s average, 29% of report downloads came from referring websites, 22% of downloads were referred by search engines.

The tactics used:
  • Tactic #1. Use search metrics to research potential report topics
  • Tactic #2. Build an online survey
  • Tactic #3. Send survey request to email database
  • Tactic #4. Host report download on a dedicated landing page
  • Tactic #5. Pitch report to media outlets
  • Tactic #6. Use social channels, even if you don’t have them
Feel free to post back your own experiences here, I'd be happy to hear about it.


Wednesday, June 02, 2010

Facebook Is Not the Whole Game -- Other Social Networks for Business



I've found this interesting take on different social media tools that are beyond Facebook interesting attempt to help entrepreneurs.

"It may seem that Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter get all the media love when it comes to social networking, but there is a wealth of sites out there to link business people with other like-minded folks. Most appeal to a niche of users, so you’re sure to find one for your particular need. As with all social-networking sites, the value comes from who else participates on the site and how actively. Most of the sites are free, but many charge for premium services (and many make it annoyingly difficult to find out the cost until you sign up!)."

Full article here
http://www.itbusinessedge.com/slideshows/show.aspx?c=79216&utm_source=itbe&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ABG&nr=ABG

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Purdue Ave,Los Angeles,United States

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Third generation ERP: user-centric and social



ERP Evolution

Back in the 80’s, ERP software have been created in order to address a key productivity issue in the enterprise. The goal, as it is still the case today, was to reduce transaction costs in automating key business processes from manufacturing through finance and sales organizations.

Transaction Cost

The notion of transaction cost was introduced back in the 30’s by a brilliant British economist by the name of Ronald Coase in his essay The Nature of the Firm in 1937 to explain why the economy is populated by a number of business firms, instead of consisting exclusively of a multitude of independent, self-employed people who contract with one another. It is an even more interesting approach knowing that this research occurred just after the big depression period, to be remembered as we have been going through an impressive downturn just now.

A transaction cost can be defined as a cost incurred in making an economic exchange. For example, most people, when buying or selling a stock, must pay a commission to their broker; that commission is a transaction cost of doing the stock deal.

Or consider the evolution of transacting with your bank. Back a few decades ago, you would have to go to the branch office for any operations like deposit a check, getting cash… This induced for the bank to maintain branch offices and full-time employees managing these interactions. The cost of every transaction with its customers was in the $10 range average. Over time, the banking industry leveraged telephone based interactions, ATMs and of course internet banking to take that transaction cost significantly down, let’s say a few cents. At the same time, customer satisfaction went up as the transaction can take place at any time 24/7, from anywhere and customers are driving the transaction themselves.

ERP Evolution of the 90’s

As the success of ERPs went on and businesses understood the value of automating key business processes with “off-the-shelf” enterprise application software instead of writing one from scratch, their appetite for more automation, more users involved and lower transaction costs, increased.

The advent of the web and its ability to connect totally different IT systems seamlessly over the cloud, with e-mail to start with then web services, offered an opportunity to ERP vendors to expand the ERP scope to other part of the organization such as sales force automation (CRM), supply chain operations (SCM, SRM) and product life cycle management (PLM). It also did pave the way to connect remote users to the ERP via thin clients or ERP client in a browser to be more precise.

This was the second generation ERP, in which a lot of ERP vendors are still in, allowing for users of the extended enterprise (suppliers, resellers, customers…) to participate in key business processes thus lowering even further transaction costs.

3rd Generation ERP

As a result, all of the ERP vendors did a pretty good job to automate all transactional business processes such as order-to-cash, service fulfillment and supply chain execution.

As a matter of fact, employees are now focusing on managing exceptions and pursuing business opportunities which are highly collaborative or information driven activities, devoting minimal time to transactional business processes. This is good for the enterprise and ERPs are thriving on this.

The net result is that the appetite to lower transaction costs is increasing again but this time, to automate more business processes, ERPs must take into account:

Digital natives are to rule the business

Digital Natives or Generation Y, referring to individuals born between the mid 70’s and early 90’s, will outnumber baby boomers in the enterprise in 2010.

96% of them already joined a social network online and they will be the managers of our businesses within the next 10 years. They are all about these new technologies to conduct both their personal life as well as their professional one, which reinforces the need to accommodate them when we think about ERPs and more generally the new generation of enterprise applications.

User centric ERP

As we combine the appetite to lower transaction cost, encompassing collaborative business processes, as well as re-engage with all users of the extended enterprise and accept that individuals are more educated and better equipped at home than in the office when it gets down to information technologies, ERPs need to reinvent itself one more time.

ERPs must be thought from the user out, it must be user-centric and re-engage with all stakeholders in the enterprise or it will become legacy. Modernizing ERPs towards 3rd generation ERPs, as described earlier, is a must to reach new levels of productivity, agility and effectiveness in the extended enterprise.

The recent evolution of our globalized and highly competitive economy, the acceleration of change and the ubiquity of information will allow for no choice but for enterprises to embrace these new trends or disappear.

"Between the dawn of civilization and 2003 there were 5 exabytes of information created, same as in the last 2 days." -- Eric Schmid, Google CEO

Now is a good time to replace legacy business management software, as most companies did that move back 7 to 10 years ago with Y2K, the Euro introduction or US GAAP, IFRS or Sarbane Oxley regulations.

Emerging economies should take advantage of their relative low technology adoption to leap frog this information era revolution and appear as highly competitive businesses. The wired economy we’re living in now is a massive opportunity.

Thursday, May 13, 2010

How to survive the crisis: let's change the world

I just started a small book by Jacques Attali: "Seven Lessons for life" or how to survive crisis, where the author develops these seven lessons in the context of the economic crisis but also suggests that we apply these in ou life to survive.

I wanted to share with you the seven lessons, imagining that they would trigger the same desire for reflection as it did for me:

  1. The first principle is to respect ourselves. This involves setting values and stick to it.
  2. The second principle, which I called "the intensity of time" should lead us to develop a project in the long term while being able to live the present moment as if it was the last.
  3. The third axis, "empathy" is to understand the dangers that surround us, to consider others (individuals, nations, companies ...) to distinguish true potential allies and adversaries.
  4. The fourth principle, "Resilience" aims to provide assurances not to lose everything if a disruption were to occur.
  5. The fifth pillar, "creativity" should help transform adversity into an opportunity by considering each problem as a challenge.
  6. The sixth axis "ubiquity " should lead to the extreme, radical change of life, to become - at least in appearance - the opposite of ourselves.
  7. Finally, if none of the above is enough, you have to put yourself in self-defense and overturn rules that threaten your own survival, leaving out the legality and enter in what I call "revolutionary thinking".
Vast program isn't it, but the opening pages depict vividly a world that is ours and that I truly belive is about time to change, at least from my point of view. Hedonism, individualism and selfishness in my opinion are demonstrating their ineffectiveness to make us happy, let's change the world.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Good presentation at Enterprise 2.0 Summit 2009 by Dion Hinchcliffe

Check out this SlideShare Presentation, very interesting view on the progress of Enterprise 2.0 penetration as well as recommendations to succeed in deploying it in your enterprise.

Friday, March 19, 2010

Why Work Could Not Be Social Again ?

I wanted to share this video with you as I like the messages a lot and the way it's articulated. I'm not in any way related to Jive btw.

Enjoy:

Saturday, January 02, 2010

Enterprise 2.0 is going mobile fast


Celebrating more than 4 Billion mobile devices in the world cannot let us stay still in our views of the mobile Internet. It has dramatically changed the consumer behavior but is also making its way in the enterprise. It has many consequences for us marketers, application developers and executives in charge or impacting enterprise information system.

According to a very interesting Morgan Stanley research - The Mobile Internet Report - issued in December 2009, some early signs are attesting of a massive disruption ahead:
  • Material wealth creation / destruction should surpass earlier computing cycles. The mobile Internet cycle, the 5th cycle in 50 years, is just starting.
  • The mobile Internet is ramping faster than desktop Internet did, and we believe more users may connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within 5 years.
  • Five IP-based products / services are growing /converging and providing the underpinnings for dramatic growth in mobile Internet usage – 3G adoption + social networking + video + VoIP + impressive mobile devices

Enterprises in the U.S. are already taking advantage of this revolution to solve business problems and meet goals in reducing time and cost, improving customer experience or including consumers directly in business processes. Information Week states:
"General Motors is looking to a new iPhone application to change how and even where people sell cars. A national chain of rehabilitation facilities sees smartphones combining with cloud computing to improve patient care and employee productivity. A heart hospital is using BlackBerrys for nothing less than real-time alerts of patient distress, including images of bedside monitors. And around Los Angeles County, law enforcement officers are using BlackBerrys for such tasks as taking and searching fingerprints." in a very interesting recent article.
In the complete research, you'll find interesting figures about more than 500 businesses such as this one



Get Ready, include mobility in your plans.