How Social Tagging Changes the Economics of Ecommerce: Customers Help You to Boost Revenue

How Social Tagging Changes the Economics of Ecommerce was a geeky session that explained how a potent mix of “people like me” navigation and digital leverage can drive sales and profits + The secret to emerging markets?

How Social Tagging Changes the Economics of EcommerceThe Global Human Capital Journal’s coverage of the Forrester Consumer Forum 2007 continues with this session on social tagging. Before your eyes glaze over, bear with me and learn how this simple, revolutionary social technology can help your customers to help your business. Forrester’s Sarah Rotman Epps moderated a discussion with Brian Rosenblat, Online Retail Industry Lead, Endeca Technologies and Jay Shaffer, Vice President Marketing, PowerReviews, who represented companies that offer social tagging solutions, and they all shared numerous examples.

This was one of the most “actionable opportunity” sessions of the conference: tagging is a relatively unknown, simple, yet transformational Web 2.0 phenomenon that will gain traction in 2008 and explode in 2009. If you aren’t doing it, you will be at a significant disadvantage to your competitors who do.

The Global Human Capital Journal published the overall conference […]

Virtual Worlds and Gaming: Fertile Ground for Real Relationships

A Paradoxical Proposition, Are People More Real Where They Live Their Dreams?—Zapped by Conventional Thinking

Forrester Consumer Forum 2007Gaming and virtual worlds like Second Life have been a hot topic due to their novelty and, where gaming is concerned, their Gen X and Gen Y demographics. However, early adopter marketers who have flocked to virtual worlds to create presences there have often been disappointed. Forrester’s Paul Jackson is a long-time follower of gaming and virtual worlds, and he gave a fascinating and valuable session on the status and best practices for how marketers can approach this new medium. He also gave a rough ROI picture of investing. Just like anything, if you approach virtual worlds with appropriate goals, you can benefit significantly.

An Overview of Games and Virtual Worlds

Jackson began with a history of virtual worlds and gaming, which are both inherently social (and usually sticky). Gaming began in the 1970s with multiuser Dungeons, and many early games were played on the VAX. The 1990s introduced 3-D graphics and VRML as well as massively multiuser games like Lineage, EverQuest and the World […]

Forrester Consumer Forum 2007—Web 2.0 Poised to Cross the Chasm in 2008

Case Studies Presage Imminent Adoption of Social Technologies—Emerging Markets Prize In Balance

Forrester Consumer Forum 2007 ChicagoA 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 […]

Enterprise 2.0 in Financial Services: Balancing Opportunity with Compliance

Growing Collaboration Culture Will Force Compliance Breakthroughs—Moving to London

Enterprise 2.0 in Financial Services: Balancing Opportunity with ComplianceThe 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 […]

The Unofficial LinkedIn User's Guide for Executives and Professionals

How to Increase Your Payback from Using LinkedIn

LI-maingrfx-guideLinkedIn is a “social” site that will prove to be of rare benefit to business executives and professionals in building individualized collaborative networks, as I explained in detail in the GHCJ Review of LinkedIn. However, LinkedIn is seriously lacking in providing a step-by-step guide to help the motivated executive to tap its real value. The functionality of the website is easy to use, but many of the finer points of LinkedIn are lost on the majority of users. This guide attempts to address that.

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Site Review/LinkedIn: A Vastly Underutilized Resource for Executives and Professionals

Valuable Space to Create Your Professional Knowledge Network

LI-maingrfxLinkedIn is a social network website that enables people to build and manage (mostly) business connections in order to discover jobs, ventures, new clients, etc. Unlike other social networking sites, its focus is business rather than social or entertainment.

LinkedIn is emerging as a dominant networking environment for executives and professionals, and its development will be of interest as both an immensely practical tool and as a study of the social network phenomenon. Founded in 2003, LinkedIn crossed the chasm in 2007, as the company reports that thousands of people are joining per day. Today, it has more than 9 million members, and membership is very global.

As valuable as LinkedIn is, one of the company’s weakest points is making itself approachable to executives. For example, I recently attended an Illinois IT Association Sales Round Table at which attendees represented a broad range of executives, IT management and professionals and were no strangers to developing relationships and business development. Presenter Steve Weinberg gave an excellent presentation on LinkedIn’s potential and features. Listening to the interaction of the at-capacity crowd, I was impressed by […]

Book Review/The Virtual Handshake

Excellent guidebook for succeeding in the online world, including social networking

virtual_handshake-smThe Virtual Handshake is an immensely valuable book, both as a handbook to the virtual world for the business-oriented person and as a guide to purposeful networking. I was compelled to get it after seeing David Teten speak at a conference because he spoke with authority while explaining new things clearly. Allen and Teten have done a masterful job at writing an interesting book that is full of useful information. Moreover, they succeed at providing a conceptual framework, so the reader can make use of the information. It is also a fun read.

As a marketing executive and a management consultant (strategy) since the early 1990s, I have helped to build parts of the virtual world the authors describe. I am very familiar with the topics, and I found the book useful on two key levels:

Conceptual: The virtual world is difficult to understand conceptually because it is boundaryless and serendipitous, and the authors describe what it is enough so you can get to the point: how to interact with it to accomplish what you want. This is extremely important […]

Agility on Tap: Demystifying the Virtues of Virtualization

Bryan Doerr, CTO of IT services powerhouse SAVVIS, pulled off quite a feat at the Technology Executives Club Outsourcing Update in Chicago last week: in 30 minutes, he explained how visionary CIOs were increasing the value of “IT” by making it vanish. “IT” is not merely being commoditized but must entertain an even more ignoble fate—being virtualized—and this is an exceedingly good thing.

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