PGreenblog

Pro-Am Finally Means Pro-Active

My degree is in journalism. I love newspapers. It is just AWESOME to me to read a Sunday paper and even the ads for (geek alert) Circuit City, Best Buy, CompUSA and others and drink a good cuppa Kona café while perusing the press.

Even better…do all that and I go downstairs into my basement home theatre dubbed the Ecenter and put on something ranging from classical to Christina Aguilera's Back to Basics, or the new tone poem from Norah Jones and read the paper and sip the java.

Ummm.Ummm.UMMM.

But I think its been pretty obvious that one of the domains most shaken up by the web 2.0 world has been media and particularly the print media which is ignored by the younger set for the far more visceral audio tunes of podcasts and iPod songs and the even more engaging visual delights of Web and soon to be ubiquitous mobile video from the likes of YouTube and ESPN.

Let me make this blatantly clear.

would you rather see?

This?

Or This?

I rest my case.

The fact is though, that we're not just viewing things from a visceral standpoint when it comes to reporting. Actually, with all the blasts at the media, and all their exaggerations, vagaries, overhype of stories that are meaningless; their pandering to the lowest levels of taste found this side of Twinkie and their clear and unadulterated claims of no-bias when that's absolutely impossible, the truth be told, most reporters in the print media or on TV are honest professionals - and I emphasize the words "honest" and most germane to this blog entry "professional."

That means that user-created content and collaboration with the customer and "citizen journalism" buzzwords aside, they know more as professionals than we do as amateurs - usually. Not always.

Long Live Heretics!

See, I'm gonna be a 2.0 heretic here. Meaning that despite my clear love of the entire Web 2.0/CRM 2.0 "thing", I'm gonna violate the temple of 2.0 culture and say something that (horrors) I know that people who love all things 2.0 don't want to hear.

All user-created content isn't good.

Yes. Once again.

All user created content isn't good.

The movement that is creating the onrush of user created content is good.

But a LARGE chunk of what is created by the users sucks big time. I mean, did you see those horrible user created commercials on the SuperBowl? That "Chevy Car Wash" winner of the College Ad where guys couldn't get their hands off a Chevy and stripped down as they stroked it. Not really funny. Professionally produced, amateur written.

That would be this one.

Okay, but enough. What I'm saying is that this isn't the era of "anti-professional" just the era of "self-expression," some of which indicates serious talent, some of which indicates serious vitamin deficiencies. So be discriminating. There is something important & valuable about people who are experts in their craft and love it perhaps too, and something important about customers' desire to collaborate and participate in activities that both enhance their own experience and benefit the companies that they are utilizing to enhance that experience.

All in all, the qualified meaning of co-creation of value. Not the unqualified adulation of user-created content.

All of which brings me to something I found very interesting in the world of the print media.

Gannet is a Bird; Its a Plane (well, no it isn't) Gannett is a Media Chain

Innovation springs from places that are often unexpected. While the major media like the Washington Post and the NY Times are making admirable efforts to digitize and be more "relevant" - their efforts tend to be more toward the purist social network side of the 2.0 electronic house. Oddly, the effort is springing from a source that I wouldn't have expected. The ownership of the newspaper that sits outside your hotel room door most every morning you're there - yes, USA Today and bigger YES, The Gannett News chain.

They are leading a charge that according to a Washington Post article last November that I just ran across, is radically transforming the way that they (and hopefully, other print media) do business:

They will be "incorporating elements of reader-created "citizen journalism," mining online community discussions for stories and creating Internet databases of calendar listings and other non-news utilities."

That is amazing when you realize that most of the other newspapers, even including the pretty surprisingly progressive NY Times are thinking that the new media is developing digital editions that can be read with digital readers. Even this slight move to the fore is considered a radical departure from the eras of Heywood Hale Broun, Walter Winchell and Arthur Sulzberger. So what Gannett is doing is beyond the journalists' pale.

The Gannett initiative is all encompassing and has created quite the fervor around the blogosphere. For a whole compendium of posts on the subject, there is a great blog called CrowdSourcing: Tracking the Rise of the Amateur that has a strong blanket thrown to cover this thing here worth looking at.

The initiatives involve transforming not just the structure and practices, but the culture of all the Gannett regional properties like the Indianapolis Star, the Des Moines Register and the Cincinnati Enquirer, among others. They don't even have newsrooms anymore but they are calling them "Information Centers." Here is the Gannett definition of that from a FAQ on it that you can read here:

"The Information Center is a new way of transforming the process of gathering and disseminating news and information. It is the evolution of the newsroom, focused on gathering the information our readers and viewers want using words, images and video and distributing it across multiple platforms: the daily newspaper, online, mobile, non-daily publications and any other media possible to meet our readers' needs. Creating an Information Center means retooling the newsroom, expanding into multimedia, embracing community interaction, shifting resources and rethinking the way a community is covered. Gannett's Newspaper Division, which has conducted a series of pilot programs to create and test the Information Center concept, organized the Center around seven key information gathering areas: digital; public service; community conversation; local; custom content; data; and multimedia. (More about each desk below). Information Centers can be tailored to fit the needs of the individual operations in each division. "

But that's not what I want to talk about. There is plenty out there on that. I'm focused, laser-like, dead-on, micro-directed at the "citizen journalist" part of this; the use of user-created content in this and what has been nicely called "crowdsourcing" by Springwise and many others in the biz. What biz that is, I'm not sure.

Crowdsourcing v. Pro-Am or Are They the Same?

Just to make one thing real clear. Crowdsourcing is NOT a term that applies to just the citizen journalist out there. Its a term for utilizing human resources outside the corporate firewall. So what I've written on Proctor and Gamble and their use of the scientist networks to help provide a significant percentage of their innovative ideas is crowdsourcing. The mod community in the PC and video games world is crowdsourcing. The use of the 400,community members to design, vote on and buy the teeshirts that Threadless sells is crowdsourcing. Expert doesn't have to be the operant term. Amateur sources who can be problem solving humans are perfectly acceptable with this approach.

One permutation or, really, justification, was James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds.

The book's premise was that the greater knowledge came from the vectored results of the totality of the crowd. I think there's some validity to that idea, but it does at least explain how to approach the sourcing of crowdsourcing.

What Gannett is doing is more interesting, really. They are utilizing the strength of their professionals to, as Michael Maness, the VP of Strategic Planning points out in BusinessWeek, " "The pros do the heavy lifting and build the framework and structure...And the audience can come in and fill in." An example of the successful use of this in a Gannett property that seems to be circulating a lot is the Ft. Myers News-Press found that home buyers were being hit with $30,000 bills for water and sewer line connections - WAY in excess of even the supernatural when it comes to this kind of plumbing effort. The news guys put a short item in the paper and online and asked for input from the citizens, providing the online tools for the input.

BOOM!!

Blueprints showed up online, discussions back and forth between the journalists and citizens and between the citizens and other citizens. Then documents began to appear suggesting illegal activities. There was increased coverage. The scandal hit. The traffic on the site (micro-site actually) became huge and the $30K was no longer the price - apparently.

This is great and a new approach to journalism that isn't new in other fields. But there are two problems. One - general. The other - Gannett.

General Problem

The quality of the material is still from amateurs and can be misleading potentially. But this is a really good thing that's going on here. Just be aware of the misstep.

Gannett Problem

This is a notoriously cheap bunch - penny pinchers. So the suspicion is that they aren't being pioneers in something new and exciting, but cost-cutters with the appearance of something new and exciting. So if it starts to cost something then the new and the exciting become the old and boring fast. But if they are truly trying to innovate so that they can engage the readers in a new more interactive/collaborative model of journalism, then its likely the harbinger of the CRM 2.0 approach to journalism - which is the the true citizen involvement in the stories that affect their destiny.

And that's a good thing. I just hope that it stays good.

Technorati : CRM 2.0, blogs, citizen journalism, podcasts, social media, social networks

To Heck with the Grammies – The 2007 Steppin’ Out Awards Finalists for the Vendor Category

Okay, for those of you who saw my post of t'other day on the revival of The Steppin' Out Awards AND on the heels of last Sunday's Grammies – an ordinary show capped by pretty much ordinary performances – with the exception of Shakira/Wyclef Jean and Christina Aguilera (Mary J. Blige, while totally sincere about her renaissance as a good person, was a bit too involved in telling me and the rest of the world about it, for my taste).

So given all of this, to heck with the Grammies. Its now time to release the finalists names for the 2007 Steppin' Out Awards.

Though I often joke around and don't take myself totally seriously (I'm a good person now, really. Let me tell you all about it…), these awards are not jokes nor should they be taken as some brief exercise in marketing on my part. They are by no means that. I spent a good deal of time over the last roughly six months doing initially high level investigations of companies that I thought would have an impact in the market that could be a potentially (good) disruptive force though perhaps not that far. I narrowed the list initally to something less than 40 companies by my count and began a much more in depth examination of the remaining companies. I didn't care whether this was a long established company or a start-up with potential. My focus was on whether or not they have a highly significant impact on the direction of business in the customer ecosystem. Which meant that what they did could help transform a marketplace – though the candidates didn't have to be the sole piece of the transformation puzzle. That meant I had to look at their offering – no matter what state it was in – their culture to the extent I could uncover it without their participation in telling me about it; their strategy as I could ascertain it; what was being said about them by others including customers and pundits; how well they "got it" – meaning their understanding of how the marketplace was changing as dramatically as it was to the 2.0 world and a myriad of others.

In no way was I able to ascertain all of that for all the possible finalists or candidates for finalist. So they were held to the standard that involved what I said in my last posting on the awards, which I will repeat here:

1. The company must be innovative and attuned to the Web 2.0/CRM 2.0 (for some of the details on CRM 2.0, go to the always popular CRM 2.0 Wiki, where the very discussion of what CRM 2.0 is is ongoing) world. Meaning that their offerings have to reflect any one or multiples of the following
   1. Collaborative or personalization tools that make the customer experience more engaging or interactive (social networking, user communities, ecommerce personalization, offer/price optimization)
   2. Contemporary technological innovations like service oriented architecture or AJAX or web-based set of applications/services
   3. An innovative pricing model (e.g. the on demand subscription model comes to mind here)
   4. A corporate culture that encourages innovation among the employees and that customers, partners and suppliers find engaging and "advocacy inducing." That includes good people at the decisionmaking level. This could be a culture that supports open source for example as a part of its approach.
   5. A sense of design (and hopefully, play) that increases customer delight.
   6. A sense of who their customer is (a.k.a. knows the voice of the customer) and shapes their customer strategy on that understanding and with the customer's collaboration/involvement.
   7. It has to be clear to me that the company "gets" it.

Number 7 is the only one that they all had to adhere to and that was a subjective judgment of mine. If I didn't think they got it, they didn't make the cut.

That alone wasn't such a small thing. For example, as you'll note below, Microsoft is one of the choices. Well, if you check out this post just a few months ago, I was seriously concerned about whether or not Microsoft "got" it. I think that they've since done several things – briefly outlined in the section on why Microsoft here – that indicate that they've changed their tune and their thinking and thus, can possibly make the impact in 2007 that they are capable of.

Otherwise, I was satisfied if they met 3 of the 6 criteria – but the more the better.

Some of what was interesting was who didn't make the cut. One that comes to mind is Apple.

What? You say with a look of astonishment! WHAT?!!!

Why Apple Didn't Make the Cut

Simple. The ONLY thing they get is design and user-friendly features and functions. You look at the iPod from a design standpoint and its stunning engineering and you just think "cool." Commoditized cool but cool. You look at the iPhone and think, Whoa, that is among the most gorgeous phones – no, it is the most gorgeous phone that I ever saw.

And it is.

But it is not a functionally wonderful phone. It is pretty ordinary. Their claims of inventing much of the technology in the phone are untrue. There's very little original beyond the design and packaging.

But that alone wouldn't be enough to eliminate them.

What is enough is that they are a company committed to Apple and Apple only. Their standards are proprietary. They guard them with their life. They are litigious bulllies (their longstanding battle with the Beatles, for chrissakes) – though I have to give them the iPhone name battle with Cisco. They don't allow any sharing of IP and they even had the nerve to tell people to not upgrade to Vista until they fix iTunes!! Like iTunes is the most important application on your desktop…? You might not want to upgrade to Vista (I did already and I'm glad I did actually) but frankly, it won't be because Steve Jobs doesn't want you to.

At least I hope not. It's enough to make me switch totally to the Zune.

Though I won't switch totally.

I'll use both.

Too much of a geek.

In more Steppin' Out Terms, the ONLY criterion they do meet is number 5.

Which means they aren't even close to the Top 40, much less the finalists.

And Now the Finalists for the 2007 Steppin' Out Awards

In alphabetical order (and in no relationship to their possibility of victory) the 2007 Vendor Category Finalists for the Steppin' Out Awards are:

Microsoft – Funny. If this were a few months ago, I would NEVER have considered them a real possibility for impact. But they have seen the light and I'm a big fan of their bulbs. They are showing me in multiple ways that they "get it." First, they're releasing their multitenant version of MS Dynamic CRM (4.0) in the next quarter this year and already have a number of specific products being developed for it. Second, they are moving quickly to develop the appropriate collaborative tools so that they are a leader in the consumer/customer experience world, not just the operating system. With their work with the Zune and the Xbox 360 as a dynamic entertainment system that is wirelessly integrated along with the release of Vista and its multimedia and user-friendly features and the intelligence with with they are moving through the Windows Live "experiment" in combination with their use of social media tools to make their corporate impact known, they are just at the cusp of potentially being a different kind of force than they are historically used to and one that I think has genuine vision. Do they have flaws, sure they do – as do all the finalists here. But the combination of their re-focus and re-engineering around customer experience and their concept of a total ecosystem to meet the needs between the home and the enterprise gives them the chance to blow the doors off this year as only Microsoft could. They might not succeed, but they very well might. Watch out.

Neighborhood America – You may know these guys. You may not. You will if you don't. They are a Naples, FL-based enterprise social networking company that has the technology, the culture and the vision to crack the walls that stand between CRM and the consumer-consumed 2.0 world. Their acquisition last October of Movo Mobile gives their already world-class social networking architecture a mobile component that moves them squarely into the peer to peer world and can only enhance what is already a remarkably strong platform. The client base of Neighborhood America are major players ranging from sensitive federal government networks revolving around multiple agencies to ABC News and other major media and retail companies. Their corporate culture, leadership and vision are just simply great. They are very cool people with a very cool technology and a foresighted vision. Did I tell you they were very cool? Of course, by the end of 2007, you'll say "pffft. I KNEW that. These guys are famous!"

NetSuite – Simple. They are ready to go public this year and have an idea that they could be valued at a $1 billion and I currently don't doubt it. The reason I don't (though I was an early skeptic of that number) is that they've made quality and quantifed leaps forward in the past 12 months in a number of areas ranging from their creation of customization tools (the SuiteFlex toolset) to their vertical market focus so that there are highly specific vertical processes attached to different versions a la carte of NetSuite. They have a fabulous corporate culture that not only understands the business value of an order driven suite of enterprise application services but the morale and "love to deal with them" value of a fun culture with upscale knowledge. Their downside? They love the Oakland A's and not the Yankees, but I have a hard time holding that against them, since Billy Beane sits on their Board of Directors. On the upside, aside from Director Beane, they have a terrific CEO in Zach Nelson who helps shape the corporate culture and the vision of the venture and the best PR person in the business, Mei Li, who even the traditional press LOVE. And, if you've ever dealt with the traditional press, you know that's no mean feat. Their technology is AJAX through and through for version 11 and there is just so much more on the table. This year and beyond could be their breakout year when it comes to true impact.

Rearden Commerce – Rearden Commerce? Who dat? If you don't know, shame on you. They are the first company I've ever seen who claimed a fully realized service oriented architecture (SOA) and actually had one. If that were it, no way would they have been a finalist, though they would be important enough. But they have a visionary business model that recognizes that businesses are aggregators of products and services, if they are smart and that the needs of business travelers are complex and can be unmanageable if not aggreggated and focused, managed and compliant. They have 135,000 plus services in their self-styled "online marketplace for services" that are associated with airlines, car rentals, limo services, entertainment venues, restaurants, airport parking, shipping, document handling, and video conferencing among other things. Using their "Personal Assistant" each employee can get access on demand to the services both appropriate to them and within the bounds of corporate policy. This smart and aggressive approach has these guys on an incredible fast track with multiple major deals - their most recent prominent one being a deal with American Express Corporate Services which has AMEX taking an equity stake in the company and offering the Rearden services to their entire corporate customer base. The success rate has been astounding – 136 of American Express' corporate customers signed up for The American Express Intelligent Online Marketplace (AXIOM) in the first 45 days. And there is far more to come.

Salesforce.com – It's simply impossible to ever rule them out as a disruptive force, given that when it comes to both CRM and now the entire ondemand model for business services, they have been THE disruptive innovation for 21^st century technology. Three years ago, their now Chief Strategy Officer Tien Tzuo told me that they were going to be a platform, not just a CRM services offering. Damned if that isn't what they currently are. They've achieved it and done it brilliantly with both their partner model built around AppExchange and their release of Apex, their programming and customization tools so that killer apps can be developed with their platform and not necessarily be wed strictly to salesforce.com, though it would be nice. They continue to innovate with their incubators for their partner-chicks. They are not just building platforms – they are extending ecosystems and THAT is a far more powerful business model. They remain formidable and definitely a true contender to continue to disrupt – in a good way of course.

Zoho (a division of Adventnet) – This engine that could is probably the smallest of the companies here which means that if they succeed as I think they very well might, their impact just well might be the most dramatic. Zoho has been developing competition to Microsoft and salesforce.com for the small business and desktop productivity in a decidedly 2.0 fashion. But you have to think about their model here. As the on demand guys we all know go upmarket, these guys are poised to provide an entire small business ecosystem that involves collaborative tools for customer/small business collaboration, office productivity tools that rival the initiatives of Google, tools for CRM focused around a highly functional web based version of sales force automation, tools that will allow small businesses to create their own applications etc. In other words – a platform and an environment all within a remarkably inexpensive model that works for the small business market with certainty. They get the 2.0 world that we're dealing with now so they get how to handle the new generations of customers and business people – which puts them ahead of most of the companies that vie for the small business space. They are constantly innovating with new ideas for products and services. In other words, they may be at the Sundance Festival right now, but they have a serious shot at an Oscar. Watch these guys closely. Real closely.

What's Next

Okay. The finalists are announced. My next set of things to do:

1. Create and send the finalist logos for putting up on websites – if the finalists want to.
2. Write a press release that I'll drop onto the wires
3. Begin the extensive profiles that each company will get in an individual blog entry
4. Polish the final draft of the questionnaires to send out to the finalists
5. Collect the questionnaires from the finalists
6. Pick a winner and let the world know why.

A Question

Do you want to vote on the finalists and try to influence my decision? Let me know and if you do, I'll set up a running vote on the blog right or left column.

 

Not The Winners Yet…The Steppin’ Out Awards 2007 & Beyond

 

For those of you who read CRM at the Speed of Light, 3^rd edition, if you paid close enough attention or cared about me even a little bit (sniff…), you might have noticed (or not) that I had a number of companies that I highlighted as best of breed in different chapters under the title "The Steppin' Out Awards."

The concept was simple. These were the companies that stood out in their category. They were companies that you might have been familiar with – Unisys, SAP, and occasionally surprises – Hitachi Consulting, Talisma, Quaero, Chordiant, among those. Most have lived up to their promise. Some not.

At the time of the book publication, a number of them issued press releases announcing their award. Which was a win-win. Nice for them and nice to know they gave me enough credibility to issue the press release.

But enough of the past. How many TV shows and movies have told us that we have to move on and can't dwell in the past. Actually, we can't dwell in the present or the future either. As far as I know, it takes a house or apartment or some sort of domicile to dwell….in. Or something.

In any case, I've decided to reinstate the Steppin' Out Awards for vendors and integrators and sprinkle it with a decidedly web-collaborative flavor. The criteria are a bit different and there will be separate awards for the vendors and the services organizations that are in the world of CRM/CEM etc. There will also be a third and new category which will go to the practitioners who are CRM 2.0-like.

So today, I'm going to give you the calendar and the criteria. Shortly hereafter the finalists for the vendors. Then the….wait, look at the calendar. You'll get the picture.

The Calendar

Event	Date
Award Criteria for Year	February
Finalists for Vendor Awards	February
Winner of Vendor Awards	March
Finalists for Services Providers Awards	May
Winner of Service Provder Awards	June
Finalist for Practitioners Awards	August
Winner of Practitioners Awards	September

 

The Criteria

First, as an exceptionally unpopular president once said (no not Bush…Nixon), "let me make one thing perfectly clear." The award selection process is NOT democratic. While I'm wide open to suggested candidate companies from ANYONE including from the vendors and their P.R. firms, that doesn't guarantee them a review by me nor does it even guarantee that I'll look into it, though odds are pretty good that with a reasonably compelling story I will. As far as this year's vendors go, I've already looked at over 100 companies, looked more deeply into over 50 companies and come up with a finalist list that will be announced in a few days. Its five companies with a possible sixth that I'm still contemplating. So there is no more opportunity for nomination on the vendors, though there is still plenty for the service providers and practitioners, if you have companies in mind.

It wasn't easy because there are a HUGE number of companies out there having an impact, but I'm limiting my choices to those that are reasonably blatant when it comes to the world of customers and neo-CRM. Thus a lot that were technologically exciting and have had significant impact are not finalists.

Thing is, they have to meet at least 3 of the a through f criteria. G is a must for everyone – period or they'd never make it even into the first round. I'm not assuming perfection. What I am assuming is impact. But more on that later.

The criteria for the finalists:

1. The company must be innovative and attuned to the Web 2.0/CRM 2.0 (for some of the details on CRM 2.0, go to the always popular CRM 2.0 Wiki, where the very discussion of what CRM 2.0 is is ongoing) world. Meaning that their offerings have to reflect any one or multiples of the following
   1. Collaborative or personalization tools that make the customer experience more engaging or interactive (social networking, user communities, ecommerce personalization, offer/price optimization)
   2. Contemporary technological innovations like service oriented architecture or AJAX or web-based set of applications/services
   3. An innovative pricing model (e.g. the on demand subscription model comes to mind here)
   4. A corporate culture that encourages innovation among the employees and that customers, partners and suppliers find engaging and "advocacy inducing." That includes good people at the decisionmaking level
   5. A sense of design (and hopefully, play) that increases customer delight.
   6. A sense of who their customer is (a.k.a. knows the voice of the customer) and shapes their customer strategy on that understanding
   7. It has to be clear to me that the company "gets" it.

As vague as some of these criteria sound, they aren't. Most of you (or some of you) know that I don't make statements without the ability to back it up. Trust me when I say, of the 50 or so companies that I looked into. I looked into them. That means that I researched them, looked at their offerings and looked at as many of the criteria that I could find without the company's active participation. This was a screening round. I graded their applications/features functions on 1-20 scale based on the customer friendly features and functions. That means that features and functions that enhanced collaboration in some way or improved experience in some way (e.g. on an ecommerce site, a tool to determine the cost and delivery time of UPS/Fedex based on where the purchaser lived) got much more heavily weighted than say, an pipeline management tool that simply exposed the multiple opportunities in a dashboard fashion to the sales manager. This is is no longer the award for customer relationship management but to steal Disney Destination's phrase for their change – it is the award for customer managed relationships.

At the high level, the vendor has to be committed to providing the tools that customers need and that partners and suppliers and employees need to create a seamless interactive, intertwined value chain that is geared toward customer value. Thus the weight on things that benefit the customers, not the managers. Though I don't rule out the features and functions that benefit the managers – merely weigh them less importantly than the others.

All of this will become clear when you see my finalists and my explanations as to why they made my finalist list.

That said, there are five finalists and about 3 (so far) backups.

Why backups?
Because, to have a chance to win, the five finalists will be sent a questionnaire of a few well chosen questions that they are expected to answer. If they don't care to or refuse to, then one of the backups will be elevated to the finalists and the finalist who refused will be acknowledged on the blog as having refused, or not gotten in the answers in a timely way.

Hey, I said this wasn't a democratic thing.

It REALLY isn't. But it is something that I think needs to be done.

The Rationale for Doing This

The reason it should be done is très simple. Good deeds and good thinking and good strategy should not remain unrewarded. Especially when it comes to understanding what the social customer is and how he/she relates to companies. That is forward thinking, cool thinking, contemporary thinking, smart thinking, strategic thinking and it should be acknowledged.

So the Steppin' Out awards are not based on how old or new a company it is; nor whether or not they fit into the traditional CRM "box" or not – meaning they provide somewhate operational improvements in sales, marketing, or customer service on the vendor side or give us great analytic algorithms. They are companies that in one way or the other, big or small, new or old, established or on the rise, who understand that the customer is at the hub of the business ecosystem and that their corporate ecosystem is now intertwined with the customer. In fact, probably the best war cry for these awards is from The Cluetrain Manifesto by Doc Searls, Christopher Locke, David Weinberger and Rick Levine:

"Companies must ask themselves where their corporate cultures end…If their cultures end before the community begins, they will have no market….Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall….We want access to your corporate information, to your plans and strategies, your best thinking, your genuine knowledge….If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change…We've got some ideas for you too; some new tools we need, some better service. Stuff we're willing to pay for. Got a minute?"

That pretty much says it in a nutshell.

So on with the awards. The five finalists will be announced on this blog within a few days – two or three, which means with my usual rate of accurate forecasting, 5 or 7 or 30.

 

 

 

Never Thought I’d Be Talking About This…

   

I Was A Younger Pup….

I began my life as a champion of technology in 1250AD working with Friar Roger Bacon, one of the greatest scientists in mankind's history to…okay, you got me. I admit it. I wasn't around then, but back in 1993 or so, I was doing something that may surprise you as I moseyed my way through the IT world.

I was building Lotus Notes practices.

Why does this matter at all and who cares, you might ask (twice)?

Because in the last few days, Lotus has done something not so surprising to me, but surprising in the grander scheme of things. First, a little drum roll of history…..

The MORE RECENT PAST – THREAD #1

Back in my younger, more carefree days (meaning, I was broke), I was building Lotus Notes practices. I was a hardcore advocate of this flat file database system that was more a platform than any other software application I had seen at the time. In fact for those who understood it as a platform, they were able to achieve remarkable results from the proletarian side of their business – those non-developers who could throw up crude but functional Notes applications that, gasp, genuinely provided value to a company. I remember speaking to Coopers and Lybrands Notes chief – I think his name was Alan Baron – I think this is the wrong spelling – and he told me that their office had 2000 – that is TWO THOUSAND - Notes applications that had been developed in multiple departments.

Notes gone wild.

Obviously, the problem with that untrammeled growth was that there was no coherent strategy behind the development. The pros were that Notes was an astonishingly easy and flexible platform so that anyone could develop at least a functional, if not elegant, application. The cons were that anyone could develop and functional application and this was "personalization without representation" – no form of republic there. The consequences were at C&L, 2000 unrelated applications grinding servers into dust.

It will serve you well, however, to remember one word from the cons – that is, the negatives, not those ensconced in the penal institutions – "personalization" because it will be meaningful in just a few paragraphs…or so.

A Detour to the Immediate Past - 2006 – Thread #2

In 2006, I spoke and moderated several panels at the RIM and partner sponsored Wireless Enterprise Symposium on behalf of RIM – makers of the ubiquitous Blackberry and its best of style version – the Pearl. While there, I met with IBM's VP of Business Development, Workplace, Portals, etc., Sean Poulley who had requested a meeting with me through their PR person. I didn't know what I was walking into at the time, but it turned out to be a demo of the newest version that would be released of Lotus Notes and Domino – as a collaborative platform.

I was surprised and kind of, in a god-I-can't-believe-I'm-thinking-this-sort-of-way, delighted that Notes and Domino were about to make a leap forward again and from their prior 19^th century perspective (I mean, flat-file database? I just DIED!!) straight to the 21^st century – skipping all the 20^th century detritus that they were wise to skip. Unfortunately for them, there were two things that they had to overcome. First, that they were perceived as a robust email application and second that, even there they lagged seriously behind Microsoft Exchange as an email application and platform. Notes has 21% of the enterprise email market – Exchange most of the rest. Though there are others – all of whom escape me. But this Notes stuff…well, a harbinger of things to come, homies.

The Almost Present Era – Thread #3

As you may have noted in these pages last month, I have been VERY perturbed that the CRM vendors, while great USERS of the Web 2.0 tools like social networks, blogs, wikis, and podcasts, haven't incorporated them into their offerings as vendors. So while there may be a blog that someone writes for one of the vendors – check out salesforce.com, Microsoft and SAP for examples of plenty of those (note it's the platform plays that are doing it the most).

May We Approach The Bench? A Sidebar On The Vendor Blogs

The blogs of the three vendors I mentione d above, are really interesting because they have such disparate approaches – and definite problems. A brief synopsis:

1. Salesforce.com – They have several blogs – e.g. The Official Salesforce.com Blog; The AppExchange Blog; Ask Wendy; PRM Blog and others. They seem to be running news accounts for the most part with a (surprise) positive salesforce.com spin on all of them. Typical blog entry headline – Apex Day Was A Success!! (It actually was - I was there – even though I was sick as a rabid ferret). Unfortunately, as smart as salesforce.com is – and they are probably the smartest and most sophisticated in utilizing the web 2.0 model – with both AppExchange and on the "consumer side" their use of outside sites like slideshare.net – the blogs are basically P.R. and read that way. Not saying they shouldn't be P.R., because you would have to assume that any vendor is blogging for P.R. as the driver, with fun being the "enabler" here. But, these read like P.R. and that ain't that good. But they, at least, are blogging where their brethren aren't.
2. Microsoft – They have so many categories on blogs that they actually have a search function. What's amazing is that each topic has multiple blogs associated with it, so for example, go to the Windows Vista topic and it comes up with 60 blogs associated with just that topic. Blogcasting has 30 blogs associated with it. The styles of the writing vary from blog to blog and many of them are pretty damned interesting, though, since this is a sidebar, I won't single out any of them. This is a pretty decent approach though the number is staggering. The quality varies greatly too. I remember a few months ago, a guy from their CRM development team who had a blog stopped his subscription to my blog because I had animated dancing Spiderman sprites on it. I guess he was a really serious guy and VERY professional and I am just-so-silly. In any case, I would say that I like the idea, though the execution is a little bit awkward and kludgy. (No obvious jokes here please)
3. SAP – Their approach is a mixture of contemporary SAP and historical SAP. The executives have blogs and I imagine, so do some employees, though from what I hear, they are primarily internal journals. However, here is an excerpt for example from SAP executive blogger, Shai Aggasi, known as the boy wunderkind and the heir apparent at SAP– "At SAP, we're 100 percent committed to innovation, and enhancing what is already the strongest software portfolio in the market. For the last three decades, we have led the way. We've anticipated this next technology waves - and today we continue to deliver the right solutions at the right time together with a rapidly growing eco system. And we're confident we will continue to do so for decades to come." That does NOT engender good conversation with customers. That sounds like marketing stuff on a blog.

Ultimately, I'd have to say that Microsoft's blogging strategy and execution, as awkward as it may be, is closer to what blogging needs to be than either salesforce.com's or SAP's for comparison. That said, at least the three of them have blog presences, unlike just about every single other CRM related vendor in any capacity at all. So kudos to them all, though they all could be better.

The Present Times Are Surprising Times – Thread #3 Continued to Now

So, here's the scoop. An article appeared in Information Week last week entitled "Lotus As A Web 2.0 Collaboration Tool? Not Quite Yet." While I can't agree or disagree with the premise of the author since I haven't done the due diligence, what made this article particularly interesting is that is was around the announcement by IBM – a company who had massively wrecked Lotus' chances of expanded success back in 1995 when they acquired Lotus – that Lotus was a company that was committed to a collaboration platform, not just email anymore so to speak.

This unto itself wasn't surprising. Back when Lotus was an independent puppy, my company at the time, Nexgen Solutions, personally partnered with Lotus on two unbelievably foresighted programs – 1) AT&T Network Notes; and 2) The Health Data Network. The former was the first (to my knowledge) publicly hosted, subscription based web-driven network program (predating the contemporary ondemand model by about 5 years); the latter the first attempt at linking doctors and patient records via the Internet as the "anytime, anywhere" communications medium for the doctor-records interaction. Both ahead of its time unfortunately – both remarkably visionary.

But the Lotusphere announcements were built extensively around not just new Notes versions but a new social platform suite. For example, one of the new products was Lotus Connections – a combination blogging, community-building, social networking toolset and platform that was designed to be, as IBM apparently called it, "business-grade." Not only can you create communities, blogs, wikis and social networks via Connections, but also dogears – which I never even HEARD of until I saw this. A dogear is a repository for enterprise level social bookmarking. Here's an article that describes the concept from Queue that came out a couple of years ago. I'm ashamed to say that me, Mr. Visionary, Mr. Thought Leader, never even heard the term except to think of what you rub when you want to say "ooohwuvyouwuvyouwuvyouyou'resoCUTE!"

Not something as weighty as enterprise social bookmarking.

While you can see from this screenshot, its not exactly gonna win the Prada Award, it is a HUGE step for Lotus and puts some of the CRM vendors out there to shame, including all the three I mention above and you can throw in NetSuite, RightNow, Oracle, SugarCRM and just about everyone else for not integrating their offerings with these kinds of tools. Funny, that the first offering though admittedly not-CRM, comes from that old, kludgy maligned platform and company. While Mr. J. Nicholas Hoover of Information Week, doesn't see them as ready for prime time – at least they're doing something that's being shown late night.

But IBM/Lotus didn't stop there. They introduced another product called Lotus Quickr, which is a wiki-like collaboration product that starts with a portal and provides the capacity to collaborate on documents. So it supports wikis, multiple-author blogs, and social tagging.

But Notes and Domino, ahhh, Notes and Domino. They have undergone extreme makeover – new face, new plumbing, new EVERYTHING it seems. The idea? Compete with salesforce.com, SAP, Rearden Commerce and the other web-services/SOA based platforms that are vying for your business apps.

The platform play that I predicted well over a year ago, is coming into its maturity. The field is crowding up and going to get even more crowded. But whever would have thought that Notes would be part of this one?

Not me, that's for sure.

I'd be careful about just writing this one off. The disadvantage that Lotus/IBM has is that Notes/Domino still has the "kludgy email platform" rep that they have to overcome and a diminished market position thanks to IBM screwing up the "Notes experience" for the last decade.

That said, they have several advantages.

1. They have years of platform experience behind them. They are not a newcomer to this.
2. They have Sean Poullley in the lead of this division – and he is very, very good.
3. They have IBM and any company that can make SAP look scrawny by comparison is good to have in your corner.

      

      

      

   So welcome back, Lotus. I'm glad to see the Dominos being stacked again. They've been fallen too long.