For the first time: the Web, 2nd to TV, surpasses all other media as News Source

I know most of you could perceive it naturally or because you're very much web centric (is this a sign of youth ;-), but I found it interesting to see it confirmed by research: the web is now the preferred source of information - whether national or international - for 40% of the researched compared to 24% in September 2007. Wow! That's a big wave in my opinion, a tipping point I should say. The noticeable progress is against Newspapers as you can see in the above diagram.

And for young people, 30 years old or less, the web rivals TV with a serious jump in 2008 - see the diagram below - indicating that TV is next to be surpassed in the coming years.

This is only good news for the Web 2.0 movement, it reinforces the importance of our web presence as individuals and as members of multiple communities.

Holiday season sales online down just 1% despite 5 days shopping missing vs 2007

According to ComScore, this online holiday season is impacted by 5 fewer shopping days this year compared to last year. The impact seems to be contained to 1% decrease. The increased average online spending per day between Thanksgiving and Christmas ($643M, up 5% from last year) does not compensated for 16% decreased number of shopping days for this period.
The e-commerce spending for the first 49 days - Nov through December 19 is totaling $24.03 billion. The top categories are Sport & Fitness (+31%), Books & Magazines (+18%), Video Games, Consoles & Accessories (+17%), Apparel & Accessories (15%), Flowers, Greetings & Gifts (+13%) while Music, Movies & Videos are down (-24%).

2009 IT Trends: can community based IT services on the cloud help?

As 2009 sets itself to unfold, major IT trends are starting to shape our future.
In a nutshell we should be watching:

• Green IT
• Expense Cutting
• Cloud Computing
• Virtualization
• Mobile Computing
• SOA/WOA
• Leaning Architecture
• Social Software, Enterprise 2.0 and Communities

It's going to be tough and only those who can go beyond their fears and control it will be able to seize opportunities in front of us. Yes IT will be impacted, but what is a better time to make the tough decisions you've been reluctant to make?
I found it very interesting that in this context the eTask.it initiative, referred to by a friend of mine part of the management team there. In a nutshell, they describe themselves as "the first IT collaborative system" addressing IT staffing via community enabled sourcing.
Cloud Computing can also deliver Service as a Service, kind of funny, or maybe more appropriately Service on the Cloud as an important part of the Cloud Computing trend.
Good luck to them. More than yesterday, lesser than tomorrow, bet on the Web 2.0 for your future.

Do you see the elephant?

You know I usually never discuss matters directly relating to the company I work for, but today I need to make an exception.
I was fortunate enough to participate to the public launch of Sage ERP X3 in Germany. Kudos to the team! Big milestone in our expansion, well prepared, executed with fun.
So here is why the exception: the German team decided to produce a funny video and I could not help but to share it with you.

Have fun! Share it, ERP marketing can be fun as well ;-)

I'm sure Christopher on the team would be happy to discuss about typical marketing 2.0 tactics.

What are the key forces driving to Enterprise 2.0 transformation?

Tectonic forces displacing enterprise applications boundaries are very diverse, I don’t pretend to be exhaustive here, but I’d like to highlight the ones having in my opinion a significant impact:

• Ubiquitous good quality (bandwidth) web access – check broadband stats – encouraging employees mobility
• Web crazy expansion (5.5M new users per week, 1.3B Internet users in Dec 2007) and more specifically mobile web expansion (3.2B mobile devices and among them 1.2B with a modern web browsing user experience) and explosive e-commerce growth - check IDC stats : 50% internet users will buy on line this year – favouring extended enterprise process development
• Users are educated at home on web based applications, noticeably on web 2.0 applications (Social Networking, Blogs, Wikis, …) and are increasingly accepting the Cloud Computing model relevance by using it (personal e-mail, Instant messaging, social bookmarking, photo & video sharing, e-banking, ….) – preparing for webtop and web 2.0 introduction in the enterprise (check "moving from deskltop to webtop" post)
• SOA and Mashup emergence as a distributed application architecture
• Transactional processes automation maturity – very typical of the ERP supported ones – will privilege productivity gains and transaction costs reduction (referring to  Ronald Coase « The law of the firm ») in automating collaborative processes and exception management, paving the way to ERP/Web 2.0 integration

This nice cocktail augmented with a solid number of “ Y Generation ” employees -- born between 1982 and 1994 - having grown with the natural use of SMS, instant messaging and social networking on the Web and which will be enterprise leaders in the next ten years - prepares the company with its change towards Enterprise 2.0 (first defined by Andy McAfee) characterized by the use of the Web 2.0 collaborative applications within the enterprise to harness collective intelligence. 

Mobile Web 2.0 revenues to reach $22.4B in 2013

Fellow Marketers, I know I've been busy like crazy since a while but let's believe that I'll be back here with more regularity.
I've been tracking Internet users growth since Scott McNealy, in one of his colorful keynote, reminded all of us that the Internet was still growing fast. Most of us in the western world do believe that Internet is a given but it's growing still fast - 5M new users per week - and growing mobile especially in Asia.



For us, marketers and software vendors, it must remain on our radar chart when we plan our campaigns and product roadmaps, especially when social networking is front stage. Why? Because more users on the net means more value for the network thus for the Internet, this is Bob Metcalfe law. It means more reach for any community every day.

If this is accurate, then Web 2.0 is going to bring a lot of revenue on the table, not only VC's, and Mobile Web 2.0 should as well. Juniper Research issued in May 2008 an interesting white paper stating that "Mobile Web 2.0 revenues to reach $22.4bn by 2013 driven by User Generated Content and Social Networking." Point taken and much appreciated.

Get ready for it. Web 2.0 burst year one i.e. 2007 was all about user generated content. Year 2 i.e. 2008 will be all about social networking and your multiple social networking identities management. More on this later, but you can double check Web 2.0 2008 conference keynotes that I did attend in San Francisco last April.

Music, Video and Software business models paradigm shift underway

When did you last buy a CD? I didn't buy one for a pretty long time and the last one I bought was from an artist I like nearly every single piece of work he creates, Pat Metheny. Is then the music business going away for a free show? Of course not, because one buys legally music on-line. Do we really?

NPD Group, a market research firm, gave us some clues recently in publishing a new report about the music industry. Here are in shorts the finding for 2007:

1. 48% of all teenagers never bought a CD (38% in 2006)
   
2. CD sold in the U.S. fell 19% from 2006
3. Apple iTunes (selling only digital downloads) is now the #2 music shop in the U.S. jumping ahead Best Buy and trailing Wal-Mart
4. 29 Million people bought music legally from online music stores, up from 24 Million in 2006 i.e. + 21%

I'm convinced buying singles or albums on-line is not the ultimate business model. What about subscribing for a monthly fee of about $20 to listen to all the music you can get legally? Store it on your MP3 device when you're not connected for as long as you pay for your subscription?

You like this idea? All the music you can get for a flat fee? What about Video
And what about for FREE?

Well checkout hulu.com, all the video you can get on-line for free, because you get advertising with it. Unfortunately only in the U.S. for now.

... and what about software? What about a flat monthly fee to access a dedicated application portfolio coming out from several vendors, a bouquet of SaaS focusing on a business or personal matter (Sales, Marketing, ...).

Let's watch this e-commerce space carefully as music and videos are paving the way when it gets down to digital goods business models tsunamis.

Where is Internet headed?

It's been a long time since I published a post. Very busy working in my new company to revamp the product portfolio and its marketing. It's a B2B software company and the question of course was: "what to have on our radar to think about the future releases of our applications".

My nickname in this new company is Emmanuel 2.0, you wonder why? That's because you're a newcomer to this blog. So here we are, trying to figure out the major Internet trends. I've always been fond of supporting my hunches with data. So let's deal with the claims first and the figures to follow.
Claim#1: The Internet is growing still very fast (5M new users per week) thus making e-commerce king
Claim#2: The Internet is growing mobile (2.8B mobile phones in 2007 growing to 3.8B in 2011 to be compared with 980M PCs in 2007 growing to 1.5B according to Gartner). "Worldwide sales of mobile phones to end-users surpassed 1,15bn units in 2007, a 16% increase from 2006 sales", Computing SA citing Gartner. And if you're wondering what is the major customer benefit iPhones brings (4M units sold in 2 quarters), here is my take: real and easy web browsing. I can at least speak for myself, I do not fire up my PC at home to navigate on the web and checkout my facebook page, I use my iPhone.
Claim#3: Web 2.0 is driving the webtop metaphor vs the desktop metaphor (check my post "from desktop to webtop" about it)

Now with the additional figure about e-commerce: "eMarketer predicts that online retailers in the US will ring up over $100 billion more in sales in 2012 than they did in 2007. Sales growth will come mainly from consumers who are shifting their spending from traditional retail stores to the Internet.", eMarketer. Take a look at the table for more details, but you can easily figure out that buying behavior and for that matter marketing web behavior are shifting big time. I would strongly advise to revise your marketing mix to accommodate at least 20-25% to web marketing including viral marketing techniques.

Finally, and I'm sure we'll agree easily, web content has also shifted to video and pictures. For this one, I'll let you find the figures. Let's rock marketing on the web for 2008 fellow marketeers.