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

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.

3^rd 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:

• Collaborative technologies: web 2.0 technologies to start with, but dashboarding (EIS) and alerts management as well,
• Information driven decision making technologies: business intelligence (BI) and performance management (CPM, EPM…),
• Visual processes representation and automation: business process management (BPM) and adaptive workflows
• Enterprise Application Interaction and Integration over the web: Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Cloud Computing and Software as a Service (SaaS)
• Mobility: mobile client computing, smartphones and tablet devices interactions

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 3^rd 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.

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.

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.

Enterprise 2.0 Summit 2009 Closing Keynote by Dion Hinchcliffe

View more presentations from Dion Hinchcliffe.

Web Evolution Nova Spivack Twine

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Web Evolution Nova Spivack Twine

View more presentations from Nova Spivack.

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:

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.

How Social Computing enters the enterprise?

As I've embarked in an interesting journey about creating a social networking set of tools and community site for my company, I tend to look more closely on how others did it and the dos and don't on the topic.

Here is an interesting quick summary of the considered two ways social computing are adopted in the enterprise, according to Dion Hinchcliffe: Top-down and bottom-up. No rocket science here, but it's interesting to see first that both ways are recommended and not exclusive as well as what drives and supports each way.

Here is an "encouraging" note to those of you in a hurry ;-) from Social Computing Journal :

"Based on their findings, the Nielsen Norman Group estimates a timeline of approximately three to five years for most organizations to successfully adopt and integrate social technologies into their intranets. They also suggest that the political and cultural changes needed for its useful and widespread use may take longer"

Have fun! I'll keep you posted on how it goes for us.

Online Ads more effective than TV for offline CPG Sales growth and brand building: +9%

A recent study published by ComScore and its research partner dunnhumbyUSA, shows that consistent online advertising can actually lift retail sales in the CPG industry by 9% over a 3 months period and contribute more to brand building than TV ads (+8% over a 12 months period according to an Information Resources, Inc. report.).

"These early results confirm the ability of online advertising to successfully build retail sales of [consumer packaged goods] brands on par with the impact of television advertising. It is likely that the more precise targeting ability of the Internet – especially in terms of accurately reaching the desired demographic segment – is a key reason for its effectiveness. That is meaningful in and of itself, but when you take into account the fact that online advertising is generally less costly than television, these results take on even greater significance," said Gian Fulgoni, Executive Chairman of comScore

Let me know how does your marketing-mix looks for the remaining part of 2009, you may bend it to more of the web?

Social Networking Users Demand for a Single Place for their Digital Identity

Power To The People: Wave 4 Social Media Study by Universal McCann

View more documents from IN2marcom .com.

Good Material to support our Marketing Plans. This Universal McCann research is conducted every year and this is the 4th Wave. Social Media is taking the web planet by storm but now is the time where it seems active internet users - those accessing at least every other day - are looking for the "one place" for their digital identity rather than spreading around various specialized social sites.

Just a few numbers to give you a clue:

1. 62.5% of active internet users (16-54 years old) have created a social profile in 2009,
2. 71,1% have visited a friend's home page.
3. 81.5% of Social Networking Users did message friends,
4. 76.3% uploaded photos,
5. 74.3% found old friends
6. 56.4% found new friends
7. 47.9% joined a group

We should provide these influencing people ways to populate their unique digital profile with ways to engage and maintain dialog with our brands in different form factors. Video is still the #1 form factor, but "instant UGM news" is ramping up as twitter's success attests and Facebook acquiring FriendFeed - that I started to use recently - reinforces as well.

Larry Ellison and Scott McNealy at Java One video

What a pleasure to see these two great leaders on stage again. How could one imagine Scott would love to go on stage with Sam Palmisano ;-)

Many have been asking me about the underlying strategy of Sun's acquisition by Oracle, Scott gives it a clue: free advertising for winning the America's cup and cutting travel expenses on Java One Japan by doing it in Larry's garden.

We do not know what's next, but what is appearing more clearly is that the Oracle/Sun combination is bound to become another IT giant that can compete head to head with HP and IBM. As Scott would typically say: go kick some butts gang!

Good luck to them, it's going to be a lot of fun to watch.

Enterprise 2.0 is coming: 30% of executives see social networking belonging to their business strategy

A recent research from Deloitte - see chart - gives us a clear signal that Enterprise 2.0 is making progress in our 2009 corporate world. As expected, this social transformation is coming from the people getting self-organized rather than from the top, as anticipated in the very good book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

As a matter of fact, 55% executives reveal that their company do not have an official policy for social networks. They'd better have one because it's easy to damage a company's reputation on social media as nearly 75% employees agrees.

There is also a risk for employees to expose their profile on social media as it can impact their reputation in their job context in a negative way. We need to address these privacy issues over time, but for now just beware to separate what your "friends" see from what the world can see.

B2B Marketers’ Priorities and Pain Points for 2009

According to Marketing Sherpa new research, the previous one was conducted in Feb 2008, B2B marketers will focus on:

1. Dealing with lengthening sales cycles
2. Doing more with less
3. Web 2.0 and social media marketing
4. Focusing on lower-cost, high-impact lead gen tactics

I will obviously only highlight the point 2. which wouldn't have been on the list a few month ago. I remember being looked at as a strange animal when pitching about Marketing 2.0 back in 2007. I heard many things as "this is just a fad", "you're always trying to bring up something new", "Our customers are not 15 years old", etc.

In the marketing area, social media and Web 2.0 importance is raising under this economic downturn period we're in, more rapidly I anticipate than if the business was going to grow. I'm expecting Cloud Computing and new software subscription business models to come up more rapidly in the IT space for the exact same reason. The economic downturn is an incredible opportunity to reconsider what we've been doing so far, to challenge deeply our fundamentals, to stress decisions that were not that urgent otherwise. A good thing in my views though of course I suffer just as everyone out there of this downturn (mood downturn as well by the way).

The research points out that many marketers still find Web 2.0 usage within their marketing campaigns arsenal a challenge. First and foremost because Web 2.0 is still new for a lot of them. They're not digital natives and tend to relate to the activities they're comfortable with (Webinars, White papers, etc.). Their top challenges, according to the research are:

1. Social media development/integration
2. Developing emerging Web 2.0 content, such as videos, blogs and podcasts

My take would be for you, already a blog reader ;-), to start your day in the office tomorrow by deciding to integrate in one of your planned campaigns a Marketing 2.0 technique. Try to pick the one that is intuitively the most relevant to your audience (start a blog or a podcast, foster a community or integrate an existing one, turn a major topic of interest into a wiki for and by your customers, start a twitter micro-blog for one of your offer) and do not forget about including video material as we discussed earlier this month.

I would also support this recommendation from Marketing Sherpa:

“Mapping content to the sales funnel “ is an immensely important aspect of success in lead nurturing for the complex sale. It deserves to be among the top priorities because some of the others – Web 2.0, social media and traditional content – are at their most effective when mapped to the sales cycle.

Marketing 2.0 will make it big in 2009.

Video is even more Web 2.0 mainstream in 2009

According to Comscore, 77% of the US Internet audience viewed video online in November 2008 for a total of 12.7B videos viewed, growing 34% compared to 2007. Do you really consider your 2009 campaigns without it?
So, some numbers for you:

• YouTube is is still on Top, representing 98% of all videos viewed on Google's sites.
• The average online video viewer watched 273 minutes of video.
• 97 million viewers watched 5.1 billion videos on YouTube.com (52.3 videos per viewer).
• 52.5 million viewers watched 371 million videos on MySpace.com (7.1 videos per viewer).
• The duration of the average online video was 3.1 minutes.
• The duration of the average online video viewed at Hulu was 11.9 minutes, higher than any other video property in the top ten.

Web 2.0 is video intensive.

Happy New 2009 Year

I strongly believe that 2009 will be the opportunity for everyone to revisit everything they've been doing so far. Our values are changing, rules must follow thus giving birth to a better world.I wish you a very happy 2009 new year looking at the stars with a smile on your face.

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.