Market-ing: Make it personal

We live in a time where communicating to broad audience alone one way has limited reach and stickiness. To make a message sticky and gain viral spread – you want to communicate through your audience. You want to foster a community of influencers who can help spread your message and communicate for you.

Ask someone who is running a business and they will more likely suggest that bigger risk they run is not getting adequate market recognition making sales cycle harder for them. Putting businesses in a position to not able to compete effectively in the market place. Unless you are doing some ground breaking invention – not many will cite they run technology/product risk as the primary reason to go out of business. Market risk usually trump over the product risk. Largely products adopts and evolves to follow customer/technology life cycle. At least until it meets a disruptive trend.

Several well known Marketing gurus have suggested how to effectively target marketing message to create the viral adoption taking “Marketing” from job function perspective to “market-ing ideas that spread” broadly. e.g. Seth Godin…around his thought process “Ideas that spread – wins” or Tribal management. or Forrester on its analysis around how to create Groundswell. Web is littered with such case studies and adoption stories – some more successful than others.

It is one of the reason - more businesses from the get go are increasingly embracing social media and encourage employees to rather share ideas broadly. Folks will invest from the start building community of developers/influencer/promoters needed to give business a market edge. Taking the discussion beyond Marketing department to engage every one involved in the endeavor to help promote your business; ideas; product; etc.

At the end of the day ask yourself – who best positioned to spread what you do best and all the creative ideas about your business than your own employees. So start the journey with your team and go get your ideas out…

Share your ideas – Social Media 101

I find myself in more situations lately educating others or asking others to embrace social media as part of professional life. It has become a norm for start up companies where social media is part of life. However, in established companies it is a journey: some leap forward and others need hand holding to get the journey started.

I usually find 2 stumbling block for the folks who have not done it before:

1. Overcome their own inertia or fear what does it mean to share ideas on the whole world wide web.
2. Not knowing how to get started – particularly how to keep personal and professional life separate and private as one deem appropriate.

I am not an expert but I have embraced few things as part of my daily personal/professional life. Here is what I do:

a. Facebook: It is my personal family/friend group. This is where I keep up with what is happening in the life of my family and close friends. I usually share personal/family stuff here. I am particular about whose invitation I accept on Facebook or who I invite to be my friend. You can find me on facebook at http://www.facebook.com/alok.tyagi

b. Twitter: This is where I microblog on what is happening in my professional life. Usually, I share organization thoughts that are important to me. I accept everyone who want to follow me on twitter – except lately I am finding blocking some people who seem to have find a way to push porn on Twitter. You can find me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/aloktyagi

c. Personal blog: This is where I speak my mind and share my personal/professional opinion on wide variety of topics – usually topics that are near and dear to my heart. You can find my personal blog at http://aloktyagi.wordpress.com

d. Company blog: This is where I represent my professional view as it pertains to the company I work for. You may want to check out your company policy. Some companies are restrictive on what you can say or not. Others are rather liberal and allows people to speak their mind. Anyway – it is better to know company policy as you blog on company site or forum. You can find my company blog at http://community.sagemas.com

e. LinkedIn: I don’t use it as much as others do. It is mostly my professional contact list and I usually use it to do quick reference check or know relationship when I meet someone new. I only accept LinkedIn requests from people that I know of or met recently at some conference/networking event. You can find me on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/aloktyagi

Anyway – there are various other avenues and some people use social media more than others. I suggest find your comfort zone and start the journey – whether to start on the personal end or professional end or both. What is important is to start the journey and be regular.

Business of software

While talking to few acquaintances who are in the business of building different kind of software (Attention based; consumer product; SaaS; or others) than on-premise enterprise software products – it is interesting to observe similar discussion. This is probably the core nature of software business. At the end of the day it comes down to 2 set of metrics driving business:

1. Acquiring new customers/members/subscribers/etc. More and more businesses now run calculations to understand the cost to acquire new customer/member. Cost to acquire new customer usually is much higher than many would guess, if they had no clue. It gets costlier in mature industry where traditional market is about replacing someone else’s product. Also, it can be costlier in the web world where there is now actual cost of  goods sold (think of all the IT infrastructure that goes around delivering a service) as opposed to the cost of CD.

Question usually gets asked: Beside product strategy to attract and differentiate offering from competitors – keep cost of customer acquisition in check; what other ways to generate traffic/leads; foster communities; target competition; create winning buzz; adjust pricing or terms; bundle products/services to make it more attractive; etc. Increasingly more web based product focus on marketing presence on the local/industry circuit from the get-go rather broadly within ranks via blog/communities to earn credibility. Increasing emphasis on Marketing too important just to leave it to dedicated few – every one has to play.

2. Retaining a customer. It is about understanding the likelihood of customers staying on the product. Generally a combination of understanding attrition rate (as some folks leaves the fold) and knowing life time value of a customer/member. Although harder to find, however, there are industry best practice metrics for the type of busines one can use as a guideline. These days businesses (particularly on the web) have a greater understanding of trends among its existing customer base. One suggestion: if you don’t already know about your customer trends – invest quickly and gain better understanding. By the nature of it -Web based businesses know well how many of their customers renew membership; what is their average monthly dues; what %age of customers usually don’t renew; on an average how long customers remain a member; what feature gets used most; demographics details; etc. Likewise, enterprise software products – SaaS or otherwise have similar metrics to help project maintenance or recurring revenue.

Question usually gets asked: What needs to be done to keep a customer happy using our product/services? What features to add (particularly that generate stickiness); what pricing lever to play; how to provide value without disrupting the apple cart; what promotion to have; etc. To find the secret formula that can help a customer retained longer paying healthy dues – is what makes a business sticky and profitable in long run.

So to remain growing – it is about adding more new customers than the customers leaving the fold. Visualize a funnel – add more while few trickle away. A math described easy but takes an organization with a winning attitude to achieve…

iCloud

Cloud computing is the buzz.

Cloud computing is on the rise.

Cloud infrastructure is becoming cheap and broadly available. Just check out the Amazon EC2 pricing.

Cloud grows (or shrinks) with my need. Infect there is a term for this aka “elastic cloud“. 

Cloud can support my on premise license software copy. 

Cloud computing has lot of cool acronyms – Saas, PaaS, HaaS, S+S, etc.

Moore’s law will continue to drive the cloud cheaper, reliable and readily available.

Some say – Cloud – like other essential services – is recession proof.

Only computer hardware that I need (someday) should be some plug on the wall.

So why buy my own hardware? when I can rely on the professionally managed, well administered, and reliable computing infrastructure for my personal or business use?

I want total control over my little cloud – including pulling it back on premise as and when I deem right.

I want computing infrastructure to be a matter of personal choice – whether I want it on premise or I want it on my cloud.

I want my cloud – mine…and good thing it is getting there.

Simplicity – an example

NYTimes published this interactive chart showing statewide voting trends of democratic primary.

Just plain simple and easy chart - allowing information to dice and slice; form individual opinion and navigate the trend.

Consider the amount of multi-dimensional data that this chart shows. It consists of 16 dimensions; 50 data points; each data point suggesting additional attribute of %age point gain; etc. times 2 – one for each candidate. This easily require decent amount of data crunching to capture the information.

Also, consider how many ways this information could have been rendered to show various scenarios effectively.

Isn’t this chart easy? Instead of getting drowned in the whole bunch of statistics and data – this chart allows connecting dots and seeing the trend otherwise not visible.

Similar opportunities exist for browser based business applications in improving user experience that enables an individual to be informed; help make decisions; manage individual relationships and network along with the variety of tasks he or she need to get done.

Social networking fatigue

This one is a funny jab on social networking sites. If you have teenagers at home – you are saying good riddance <grin>

Enjoy!!!

Social communities at its best

Someday you happen to stumble on a story that just amazes you. I happen to come across an article on Kiva.org. It is building a community that matches people who want to give with the people who could use some help around the world. Kiva has taken micro-financing to a new level by combining the power of Internet with the power of human spirit.

Personally, I like how Kiva identifies people as entrepreneurs who could use micro loan and help improve life of a family.

You can learn more about Kiva at its site Kiva.org. Following Youtube clip provide a glimpse of the Kiva goals. Become a lender.

Living in exponential time

Nice clip sharing changes happening at macro level. An eye opener for those who have kids.

Facebook

Last month or two, blogsphere is abuzz about Facebook. Particularly, after Mark Zuckerberg, wonderboy CEO of Facebook, announced F8. For those who missed F8 announcement - this is Facebook launching a development platform to building applications leveraging social networks. A very good analysis of Facebook and its new social platform is done by Marc Andreessen at his blog here. I will recommend reading it.

F8 platform provides a good extensibility model around Facebook at interfaces/API, data access and user interface level. I also like the fact how it makes a close system – Facebook site in itself, open to building and extending the system – like building other applications on top of Facebook plus the governance model around it.

This move towards providing a platform for build social applications and access to its social network is fuelling speculation on how Facebook is going to be the next big thing. Pundits are already putting Facebook in a different league than MySpace given its open platform and ability to attract and build healthy and bigger ecosystem.

Personally, I like the move as it continues to influence and challenge traditional development thought processes by opening up the development paradigms necessary to embrace social style of development. An approach that embrace opening up development paradigm to foster healthy eco systems required to serve products and services necessary to deliver unique customer experiences. I have covered this topic in different contexts here, here, here and here.

Growing the ecosystem

Application grows Technology

Ecosystem grows Application

One example is Google maps. Although a late entrant in the world of maps with an established competitor Mapquest. But by opening up its APIs and encouraging it to be used beyond “driving direction” has promoted a healthy ecosystem of building unlimited solutions around geographical mapping needs.

Now Google maps based mashups are available around the world on almost any concept. Innovation is happening daily expanding the influence of Google Maps without Google breaking a sweat leveraging the power of many that grows everyday.

Similarly, healthy ecosystems around enterprise applications continue to differentiate among current players. Organization and product encouraging ecosystem that goes beyond basic enterprise need expanding it to address niche markets, new industries, micro verticals, various local/global needs etc. find itself scaling faster than its competitors regardless of the size. Key remains how to nurture this ecosystem towards delivering end to end customer experience consistent with the core throughout its life cycle.

One success factor is when organization is able to tout “proudly made elsewhere” rather than tied to “not made here” syndrome. An example is P&G – in the March 2006 issue of HBR there is a good case study on how P&G found its new innovation strategy. The Article titled “Connect and Develop: Inside Procter & Gamble’s New Model for Innovation” discusses how “invent-it-ourselves” was restricting its growth and what it did to turn around.

So support your ecosystem to spur innovation and growth needed by enterprise products to scale new heights.

Mass collaboration

Another nice clip on YouTube passed on to me by my colleagues at Sage. This one capturing how web is changing social experience.

 Thanks to Jarett Smith and Robert Fayle from Providex team on sharing this.

Changing Web

Web is changing. Here are the symptoms:-

1. Web is becoming a trusted medium
2. Web is getting self governed
3. Web is becoming reliable
4. Web is the knowledge
5. Web is becoming the way of life – this life and second life
6. Web is social for both social and anti-social people
7. Web is the place for people to hang out
8. Web is the great equalizer – brings power to all
9. Web gives it – Web takes it away. Don’t earn notoriety on the web.
10. Web is changing personal habits. 

And for the nerds

1. You can sell web sites for over $1bn

Simplicity

There is much chatter about Google and its product strategy in the blog circles lately. Particualry after it announced closure of the “Google Answers” earlier this week.

Few posts are here, here and here suggesting reasons and how strategy could be changing at Google. Also, Brin suggests simplicity as way to succeed in future.

Simplicity is also key consideration for building successful enterprise product .

It reminds me of Steve Krug suggesting how development should be thinking about building products that customers can use in “Don’t make me think“.

On a side note – wikipedia remains impressive updating its entry on Google Answers real time. Living to the promise of social web providing accurate and relevant information available on timely basis. What a simple concept.

Stitching systems together

As the need increases towards providing Internet scale systems either to serve consumer business or to serve enterprise businesses – various SaaS providers are working towards building huge IT infrastructure needed to support their services by stitching boxes together. Companies are putting much effort around how to architect, build, manage and provision such an infrastructure.

To that cause – Sun recently announced “BlackBox” effort as it tries to find its way and regain its footing. The pictures of the “Blackbox” are just great – it is datacenter pre-built in a shipping container and ready to be hooked up. Kinda data center on demand shipped to you right from the port. Side effect – it also saves the building cost needed to house the data center for much of the entrepreneurs who are bootstrapping their ideas. Can this thing be rented? Check it out for yourself…

 

Data everywhere, Information somewhere, Decisions nowhere

Sometime back, I wrote my thoughts around Enterprise 2.0 and how it is about leveraging social communities within an extended enterprise. I was asked whether Enterprise 2.0 is just another round of attempt to deliver on the promises of better analytics and knowledge management. I have already covered my thoughts on why Enterprise 2.0 is more than that. Regardless, I believe progress within analytics/business intelligence space is key towards achieving Enterprise 2.0.

Relevant data that provides everyday vital information is key to making decisions. And it is a powerful notion that influences people behavior.

Various opportunity areas where much progress is happening within enterprise industry are (this is not a comprehensive list, feel free to add others that you see missing) :-

1. Delay between generation of data and for the corresponding action to take place - How to quickly get to decisions? New analytical models around SOA/Events based architecture paradigm are emerging here. How this system will scale and perform as the trend continues to evolve from batch to realtime for widely available 24×7 system with more internal/external end users will be the testament and tipping point for possible Internet scale adoption.

2. Disjointed analytics from everyday business process - How analytical information get closer or be embedded within business applications like billing, accounting, other ERP applications, CRM, etc. so that users have their transactional and analytical information available side by side to take action when things happen. Much progress is happening here on daily basis by the application, analytics and integration vendors trying to bring analytics closer to business processes. 

3. Automate “most” of the regular tactical decisions - How to overcome or provide additional intelligence needed in the data to be able to identify and isolate bad information generated due to the noise from the actionable good information? Today, much of these interpretation happens manually. I am sure some level of human involvement will be needed but the idea remains how to automate “most” of the regular tactical decisions needed to keep things flowing on everyday basis. SOA/BPEL/Events based architecture has the promise to potentially automate “most” of the tactical decisions. But the challenge will be how to eliminate noise before acting on some information. You don’t want some automatic tactical decision being made due to a noise that result into potentially more bad situations.

4. Meaningful presentation of various analytical knowledge – gleaned from wide variety of information at different level of granularity. Information need to easier for human to read, interpret, drill down and act upon. So much progress has been happening here due to Web 2.0 and touted reverence to the dashboards that demos so well. The need here is also to continue to make it pervasive, available wherever needed, and making it available in wide variety of form factor.

5. Ever increasing size of data - Advent of new technologies like RFID and increasing automation of processes has opened up the flood gate of data (structured/unstructured)that needs to be analyzed and aggregated on daily basis. This is growing data size to manage and analyze by leaps and bounds. Increase bandwidth, much innovation in the storage and other industries for faster access continues to push the limit. One hear terra/peta/exa byte much more often in conversations – something not common just few years back.

6. Quality of data that gets integrated and aggregated from various sources - Maturity of the integration/EAI products, better cleansing and aggregation tools, increase automation, etc. are helping keep data fresh, consistent and actionable.

Analytics future is exciting as the technologies are maturing, business use cases are evolving where market is looking beyond aggregated historical trending information to reflect the current or future needs. Companies are asking for front view (real time, forecast data) beside rear view mirror (historical information) to run business. Continued consolidation of the industry – Reporting, Performance Management, Analytics, Data Warehouse, Knowledge Management, etc…will keep this space exciting and help bring several of these information islands closer.

Startup Ideas

Anyone looking for startup ideas that will get famous VC backing – look no further. Here is a list of compiled startup ideas actually suggested by well known VCs that they would like to fund.

It is all about Business Processess…

There are several upcoming technologies that will have much impact to the enterprise applications like SOA, Web 2.0, etc. Various pundits have already touted the technical advantage of all these technologies. To prove the point, every major software vendor today, has a SOA strategy. So how does all this cool technology will help businesses whose only job is to manufacture, sell and service some simple widgets and not necessarily care about what technology they uses. Infect, they probably don’t care whether it is Web 2.0, SOA or some RPG/Cobol on a green screen terminal.

Business deploying enterprise software (ERP, Supply Chain, CRM, HRMS, etc.) uses technology as a business enabler to help them manufacture the widget cheaper/better/faster or service its customer better, etc. Successful companies proud themselves on their business processes making them unique and differentiating them in their respective market. Technology wow factor is usually not the front runner. Much of enterprise businesses remains slow on the technology adoption curve. At best, it may either be classified as “Early majority” or “Late majority” if not outright “laggard” trying to avoid “Innovator” or “Early adopter” technology adoption curve.

So how would all the upcoming technologies help existing business processes of a company? To do that let’s look at the key components of what makes a business process and understand how these upcoming technologies can be applied to make aspects of business process better. One can certainly add or refine the list here.

• Information – Information is critical to any individual executing a business process successfully. As technology continue it improves it is providing new benefits that were not available before like –
  1. Reliable information that provide deeper visibility into what goes on in a business
  2. Real time information when you want it, where you want it
  3. Information from relationships – multiple degrees apart and from extended sources like partners, suppliers, outsourcers, employees, market places, etc.
  4. Information from unstructured sources – capturing knowledge, increase integration with email, files systems, document management systems, etc.
  5. Vastly improved searches for mining the sea of information and analytical tools to come to deliver what you want and understand Patterns, Metrics, goals, etc.

• Tasks – This has been the frontier as industry has been busy automating much of the human tasks aggressively since more than a decade or so. Also, as existing tasks gets automated – new set of human coordination tasks or extended responsibility appears in the horizon. Some benefits from new technologies here are:-
  1. Extending/changing existing tasks without writing code – STANDARDS is the way to go
  2. Easy creation of new tasks as new processes comes to life
  3. Enabling work-flows easier between automated tasks and human tasks
  4. Quick alignment/training of the team to ever changing processes regardless of location of employees
  5. Enables getting tasks done cost effectively without sacrificing quality or customer satisfaction goals
  6. Enables ramping up new people easily and help extend enterprise frontier to newer geographies

• Interaction – A business is net sum of its people accomplishing their individual tasks and interacting with each other. This is their everyday interaction as they formulate, strategize, decide, work, act with each other to take company ahead one day at a time. Much is based on the foundation of real time visibility, availability and ability to engage everyone needed in a dialogue. Huge benefits from new technologies in this space:-
  1. Collapsing invisible walls that were between the parties/individuals as relationship maps become visible
  2. Continue to make world a small place to live, connect and make interaction real within it larger ecosystem
  3. Assess and establish new relationships quickly – expand ecosystem and extend reach
  4. Increased participation of many in decision making as several new communication channels reaching out to all becomes available – enabling the system to operate on power of many
  5. Capture, track and publish knowledge at determined time to feed into everyday work
  6. Speed up information sharing, decision making and rollout to the ecosystem
  7. Speed up feedback from market on decisions and place effective measure to correct

To sum it up upcoming technologies holds the promise of providing new kind of business processes not possible today or refining existing business processes that can help a company to remain differentiated and successful.

Just as an example – think today we enter more trades every day (couple of billions everyday on NYSE these days) than what we used to do in a week couple of decades (couple of million everyday on NYSE in early 70’s) back. All of this due to technology improvement that leverages the same process of placing, reconciling the trade, clearing the trade, settling the trade, invoicing, paying for the trade, etc. But now these tasks are automated, collapsed various walls that were needed in the past to place a trade, and provide real time information to a trader. New processes have evolved around technologies like real time information, increase self service, automatic trade placement, portfolio analysis, etc… that is changing the scale of business.

There are many examples how leveraging the right technology can help things scale quickly that is otherwise not possible. It is this promise with upcoming technologies like SOA, Web 2.0, etc. for businesses allowing them to unleash new level of accomplishment across its social communities – makes enterprise applications an interesting space for years to come.

Blogging metrics

For someone interested in knowing various blog metrics and its relevance – this is a nice summary by Techcrunch folks on its own blog. 

As someone said you can’t improve what you can’t measure – hopefully this will provide insight to how to improve a blog.

Google’s time machine

While growing up as a kid in independent India, I used to wonder how was India’s independence portrayed in the then European and American media. Thanks to Google who made news archive available now – making it convenient for people to peek back in the history and review the news articles from the past. I like reading Time magazine articles reporting India’s independence from 1930s. 

Did you know Mahatama Gandhi only weighed 76 lbs? wow! I missed that detail – knew he was a lean person. I had not imagined though if he was this frail with such strong determination in his belly.

Anyway, check yourself out Google news archive here. It gives time search as well – so you can track the progress of important historical events.

Ignorance has never been an acceptable argument – and now people can learn from the history more than ever without pleading ignorance of the past <grin>

Enterprise 2.0

Much discussion is in progress about Enterprise 2.0 – including a large cry after “Enterprise 2.0″ was deleted from Wikipedia earlier. Here is my simple explanation of Enterprise 2.0.

Model every day enterprise users activity leveraging Web 2.0 based technologies (like Ajax, RSS, Wikis, blogs, IM, etc.) that can provide increased social interaction (like successful models of MySpace, YouTube, eBay, etc.) and enriched personal experience needed to build highly collaborative geographically distributed company/community (including employees, customers, partners, supply chain and other communities). A foundation that can help generate increase level of productivity necessary to manage both top line growth and bottom line control. Consider this along with other technology innovations (like RFID, SOA, etc.) and wider deployment choices(like SaaS, Licenced, BPO, etc.) – if anything enterprise industry is getting into some exciting time for innovation.

Enterprise 2.0 naturally enhances the current web based computing model that forces developers to think abstract application components rather than facilitating user interaction (say with your customer or salesforce) that is needed to provide the social experience of getting a task completed. BTW, this happens today although in a primitive way – today one person enters the info in a form that stores relevant data in one tableset that either a work flow or by some other trigger mechanism notifies other person who then picks the recordset from those tables; do some work; and put the modified recordset in another set of tables for another user to pick and do something about it. One can make this user interaction worse if you consider integrated legacy applications and best of breed suites in today’s IT environment – where users have to jump from one application to other hoping to find the relevent information needed to progress the work flow. Think about how this behavior of user interaction can be enhanced leveraging some of the successful and other upcoming future social interaction with the web when trying to accomplish a task.

Thre are other interesting scenarios as well that can be thought of as Enteprise 2.0 takes some shape. I can see much improvement in the CRM space to improve customer facing functionality. These new models will evolve in the time to come as technology gains wide spread adoption and as enterprise vendor catches on to capture social experince needed for them to continue to retain and grow their customer base.

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