Social Computing at an Inflection Point—Preparing to Be Overwhelmed
 The Global Human Capital Journal’s coverage of the Forrester Consumer Forum 2007 continues with this session on Delta’s experience with customer blogs. Moderator Henry H. Harteveldt did an excellent job setting up the session and letting Laura R. Hunnicutt, Delta’s General Manager of Customer Experience, talk with the audience about some real-world practical problems of moving executives’ legacy thinking to Web 2.0. Having enterprise visionaries and thought leaders added tremendous value to the conference.
The Global Human Capital Journal published the overall conference wrap and will have several other in-depth articles in the days ahead. You can be notified as to their publication by subscribing to the forum’s RSS feed.
This session showed that social computing can have a powerful strategic impact at inflection points in companies’ histories. As everyone knows, Delta is recently out of bankruptcy, and the airline business is difficult on a good day. The company is in a period of high risk-high reward, and Laura gave the audience a heartfelt behind-the-scenes look at the company’s Web […]
Dell and Procter & Gamble Innovation Leaders Share Web 2.0 Transformation Insight—The Slow Boil
The Global Human Capital Journal’s coverage of the Forrester Consumer Forum 2007 continues with this session on what I’ll hazard to call Innovation 2.0 ,^). David Armano of Critical Mass moderated this an infectious session. It was clear that Proctor & Gamble’s Stan Joosten and Dell’s Manish Mehta had been in the innovation trenches, and their comments were extremely valuable.
A key ingredient to Web 2.0’s transformational potential is that the technology is an order of magnitude more explicit, easy to use and less costly. It’s possible, and desirable in many cases, to take small steps. On the other hand, Dell took a risky step in launching Direct to Dell in the midst of serious customer service problems, and it leveraged blogs to turn the situation around.
The Global Human Capital Journal published the overall conference wrap as well as in-depth coverage of several sessions. Access all through the link to the conference logo (right). Other articles will be published in the days ahead, and […]
Case Studies Presage Imminent Adoption of Social Technologies—Emerging Markets Prize In Balance
A who’s who of global marketing executives convened on the Hilton Chicago October 11-12, 2007 for two days of cramming on social networks, emerging technology and transformation. It certainly felt like an inflection point: analysts’ insights and technology pioneers’ zeal were tempered by corporate stories in the trenches. Based on my experience with previous adoption curves, I predict a significant jump in Web 2.0 adoption by corporations next year.
Depending on your industry, the next six months will be your last chance to be early to market. As success stories become more widespread and executives realize that Web 2.0 has very low barriers to adoption due to the social Zeitgeist and a relatively low price point, the use of social technologies will rapidly become mainstream. The main barrier to adoption is cultural resistance and organizational inertia.
Although this was not a technology conference, in my conclusions, I will provide some insights about why and how Web 2.0 represents a fundamentally new technology value proposition that makes it […]
Growing Collaboration Culture Will Force Compliance Breakthroughs—Moving to London
 The Global Human Capital Journal’s coverage of Financial Markets World’s Web 2.0 in the Capital Markets Industry conference continues. In this session, Eran Barak, Global Head of Strategy for Reuters, moderated a discussion with panelists David P. Olener, Director Legal Discovery Solutions at Orchestria, and Warren Roy, President & CEO of Global Relay Communications. They are well qualified to discuss this topic: As a former litigator, Olener has extensive experience with complex discovery and has consulted to numerous Fortune 100 clients in compliance, security and risk management. Roy’s company is a hosted compliance archiving and messaging suite used by over 1,200 financial and legal firms for regulatory purposes.
Their consensus was that enterprise 2.0, notably IM (instant messaging, chat) introduces significant issues with highly regulated financial services firms. Although this is widely known, many of the details of how the technologies can pose problems were illuminating. We will provide a summary of the panel before adding our insights.
Enterprise 2.0 Technologies and Regulatory Issues IM is […]
A Glimpse Inside the Emerging Divide between Wall Street Professionals—How Many Goldman Employees Are on Facebook?
The Global Human Capital Journal’s coverage of Financial Markets World’s Web 2.0 in the Capital Markets Industry conference continues. In this session, Tom Steinthal of the BSG Alliance wrapped the conference by crystallizing several Web 2.0 concepts with passion and panache. Tom is Managing Director of BSG Alliance’s Financial Services practice. Previously he has managed equities technology teams at Goldman Sachs, Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, Credit Suisse, JPMorgan Chase and Prudential. Further back, he led Nasdaq technology teams and designed and implemented Nasdaq trade order management and market making systems. He has been a member of various Nasdaq and NASD technology committees and has been Series 7, 3 and 55 licensed.
Wall Street firms will increasingly get caught up in several threads of culture change, but he emphasized two: the generational divide and, related to it, collaboration vs. control. In this context, “building an enterprise 2.0 system ’employees’ will use” must take into account very different styles of working and […]
Converged Experience Presages Telecoms Transformation—Reexamining the Value Proposition
 CTOs Chris Rice (AT&T), Pieter Poll (Qwest), Mark Wegleitner (Verizon) and Matt Bross (BT) agreed that the discrete services that telecoms now offer would morph into a seamless, hyperavailable cloud of communications services. The converged experience will be seamless, feature-rich and accessible when, how and where consumers want. Telecoms’ ability to deliver will drive their stock prices in the near term and was the focus of the discussion.
From an operational perspective, telecoms have been too focused on product/service P&L. Now they have to eliminate barriers between products, so the customer can have a context-appropriate, seamless experience. The first phase of this transformation is bundling existing services; however, the real value will come from innovating new services. All applications will be unified around an IP (Internet Protocol) infrastructure. Telecoms don’t need to integrate networks; they need to build networks that interoperate.
Between the lines and longer term, telecoms must reexamine their value propositions because we are coming to the end of the era in which custom applications and proprietary interfaces were necessary to integrate networks’ “islands of automation.” Network-centric software […]
The Rise of the Niche Will Transform the Mass Model—The UGM Threat Is the Opportunity
The advertising industry is at a crossroads. It came of age during the Industrial Economy, and explosive growth coincided with the development of the mass media and the focus on “brand” TV and print advertising. Big media and advertising reflect Industrial Economy values and sensibilities: produce big numbers efficiently and innovate when necessary. Amortize existing investments. The problem is, Knowledge Economy customers want to be communicated with as individuals. Since advertising’s processes have been built with big numbers in mind, they are expensive, and the numbers don’t work when agencies try to address niches.
Efficiency in advertising has given rise to a value chain that is as heavy with inflexible infrastructure as the airlines’ hub and spoke system. Advertisers remain focused on “reach,” the number of eyeballs that view their messages (and respond when it’s measurable). That’s how advertising effectiveness is measured. Advertisers are resistant to changing this system, and that makes emerging technologies like mobile video and social networks of secondary interest to them. Meanwhile, innovators are developing technology and offerings to […]
Content Providers Hobbled by Conventional Thinking—UGC May Fill Content Vacuum in Plum Mobile Video Market
At Digital Hollywood Chicago, speakers held that video would grow significantly as a portion of content experienced on the three screens. However, no panelist gave a compelling reason that video would grow—and there are many problems that will dampen adoption in the short- to medium-term. I question whether they are just trying to drive demand to drive their businesses. Don’t forget that this conference is digital Hollywood.
Myopia is content owners’ biggest problem: they seek to repurpose existing content for the mobile screen to amortize past investments. This logic permeates their thinking and prevents innovation. Meanwhile, consumers are awakening to the excitement of consumer-produced content, the prices of software tools are falling, and skills are increasing. True, the production quality is usually amateurish, but UGC (user-generated content) is usually free, fresh and relevant—to niches, which is where the action is. Users produce content for fun, and they can afford to address topics that “professional” content cannot. Mass-produced vapid content will still have a place in the consumer entertainment universe, but it will decreasingly […]
But Legacy Thinking Makes Agency Ecosystem Vulnerable to Disruptive Change—Who Will Be Their Southwest?
Technology is remaking the advertising business because it is beginning to enable individualized targeting via automated tools. It is not a moment too soon.
The ultimate context for this session is that technologies are driving interactivity, which is becoming the default for marketing communications. Legacy players in the marcom value chain have mixed feelings: they want to leverage their investments in legacy processes, people and relationships, and many of their clients are not pushing for interactive or its latest incarnation, digital video.
Thought leaders and visionaries are frustrated by their colleagues’ reticence because they perceive that marketers’ worst fear—irrelevance—will soon ensue unless they begin to make serious investments in digital video and Web 2.0, which highlights peer-to-peer interactivity.
When it burst into public view with the growing popularity of the Internet (“Web 1.0”), “interactivity” represented new capabilities and sensibilities. Viewers of marcom messages could react to the messages by clicking, and these clicks could be tracked very economically.
 However, this was merely a brief overture […]
Consumer Mistrust Will Slow the Reality of Mobile Personalization Vision
Panelists at Digital Hollywood Chicago constantly spoke about mobile as the most “personal” of the three screens—for several reasons. The phone number is individual, so all the device’s activity can be attributed to a person, whose preferences and needs can be deduced from the activity. In addition, the mobile (phone) accompanies the individual almost everywhere, so it offers a wide scope of visibility into his/her activities, location and interactions.
The mobile device will soon lose the “phone” moniker because the device morphing into a portable digital hub. “Smartphones” have seen much slower adoption than hoped, but functionality, power and capability are steadily increasing while prices fall. Apple’s iPhone was constantly mentioned as the promising breakthrough device.
Mobile devices will change relationships far more than the first screen (TV) or the second screen (computer) because they will touch everyone, their capabilities will rival laptops’ within 2-3 years, and they are inherently social. Social networking via video sharing, Web browsing, email, SMS, IM, music sharing and voice calling is on tap in the latest smartphones. The problem is, their features […]
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