In the late 1990s the CMS invaders deployed their systems at large corporations, as managing web pages using HTML editors wasn’t scalable and non-technical folks needed to publish. In many cases after the invader left, the company’s business teams and technical web teams were stuck cleaning, fixing, enhancing, for years to come.

Unplugging web publishing systems (and community platforms) ain’t easy.

Publishing from Word Docs, ouch.
I was a web manager at a very large corporations, as such, I was the business sponsor for the website, and therefore the tools that were used to publish the website. Often, in most cases, I inherited a legacy CMS system, one that I did not choose, the underpinning structure of the site revolved around it, documents, navigation, ability to edit pages, and look and feel.

This was one of the worst implementations of CMS systems I’d ever seen, the idea was for non-technical people to edit the webpages, so the system would have the ability to check out a ‘word doc template’ filled with macros, publishers could edit the word doc, check it back into the system and a new webpage would appear. fail.

The templates were so complicated as users had to be trained on how to use the word docs, understand the styles, and all the nuances associated with the code. The linking structure linked to a primary key for a document, which also caused confusion. That’s just the publishing process, it gets worse.

The Pains of Content and Structure Coupled
The site was unfortunately designed so the structure would for the most part, remain constant. The structure of the site, and the content were coupled together, and that’s a major problem. As the site would grow and more pages were added to the taxonomy, the system became more and more inflexible. The developers had a very complicated way of managing the pages, the changes took a few days to work as the underlying code had to be changed. The simplest of web changes that you would expected to see from a web CMS system required ongoing developer support –not content changes at the business level.

I’m not going to mention the name of the CMS vendor who provided this less than stellar tool, as I believe the deployment of the system was to blame from the in house technical group –all of which happened before I got there. Whew, I feel better, that’s been pent up inside of me for a few years now.

Thinking forward: Community Systems of today, to be legacy systems tomorrow
As we deploy community solutions that have social media features, are we thinking about in a few years how these legacy systems will be inflexible, don’t talk to our other systems, cobbled together application ware that we loosely couple with our other customer facing web systems?

I also know of many business groups that are deploying community software, often by ‘notifying’ IT that they are doing it, sometimes without thinking about the long term implications of these systems not being able to migrate, talk, or share data with other websites. In many cases, the business sponsor will move on to another role, job, or company, leaving the archaic community platform in the hands of the next web strategist.

Two questions for you:

1) I’d love to hear from you about your CMS horror stories, feel free to leave a comment below, go ahead, vent away.

2) Are you deploying a community platform for your web strategy at your company? What are you doing to plan for the long term 5+ years impacts of this system in regards to the rest of the enterprise web strategy?

34 comments

Embrace your Customers
At Forrester, we use the term Embracing as a social strategy where customers and employees work together using social tools to build next-generation products. Quite a change for the strong headed product manager, who now has to set the roadmap, while in collaboration with customers.

Popular Examples: Dell and Starbucks
We’re all familiar with the popular Dell “Idea Storm” website that let customers vote for which features and products they wanted to be bore to the marketplace. In Dell’s case, the linux community asked for a UBUNTU box, which was created and launched and sold. I wish I was a fly on the wall when Dell’s strategic partners at Microsoft found out about this.

Recently, Starbucks has launched My Starbucks Ideas, where customers are voting for improved services or products in each of the stores. Looking at the site, the request for free wireless or ‘punchcards’ for frequent customers is under consideration or has been improved.

Both powered by SalesForce
Both of these sites are powered by Salesforce’s product, Ideas. Move on over, there’s a new player in town called UserVoice that offers the same features right on their site.

UserVoice, a new kid on the block
I’ve played around with UserVoice and even created a version for my own Web Strategy blog, the simple features made it easy to setup and let others submit ideas. I’ve not stress tested this service to see if it can withstand enterprise activity like SalesForce can, but it’s a nod to a common feature (voting) that we should start to expect to see in white label social networks. (in fact, I know of a few that are going to launch this)

Reporting, Query features, and easy to setup
Other UserVoice features to include Google Analytics, and the ability to collect demographic information and let owners know of suggestions. Owners of voting sites can also segment their customers by different purchasing sizes, in order to help prioritize. Also, polling features will help to put color around suggestions from users, and other conduits to improve the connectivity between employees and customers.

For example, I created this own Web Strategy UserVoice page where you can go and make suggestions on how I can improve this website.

Recommendations
If you’re a small company or individual blogger, or run a niche product, I encourage you to try out UserVoice, test to see how it scales, and come back and leave comments on your experience on this post. If you’re from a large company that has thousands or millions of customers, start with SalesForce and also trial UserVoice. Anyone that wants a fully custom user experience should start with SalesForce.

Update: I’ve received some tweets and comments also suggesting IdeaScale (which I think is the same as this product of the same name), I’ve not looked at it, please leave a comment if you’ve a review. Also, passionate CEO Matt from BrightIdea left a comment about his enterprise class competitor to SalesForce, I look forward to a formal Forrester briefing from him, let’s take a closer look at this growing segment.

What to Expect
UserVoice would make for a good partner for any of those white label social networks, and could even be an acquisition target for a vendor that’s not up to speed in this emerging feature set.

Expect other White Label Social Networking vendors to offer this feature, soon it will be on the ‘checklist’, of features. Customer voting? “Yup we got that.”

They aren’t the only ones to watch, Get Satisfaction, a support site for any product, anywhere, (no reason to go to that irrelvant corporate website) has launched, and customers are self-supporting each other, and some savvy companies have their employees there participating. Without surprise, I’m there representing Forrester, although there’s been no activity. Satisfaction is still very startup focused, I hope to see some Fortune 1000 companies appear on their site.

Lastly, UserVoice itself is, “eating their own dog food” so to speak, using their own service to improve their product, there’s already a small flurry of votes happening.

27 comments

We live in a hyper-connected world, yet part of the blowback is the excessive communication that occurs –I fear it will only get worse over time.

Today, I spoke to an Executive at medium sized corporation who confessed that she cannot keep up with her email inflow. She receives about 500 emails a day, and told me at the end of the day she sorts by sender. First from her CEO, then by the folks on her team directly reporting to her, and then whatever else she can get to.

Despite the many collaboration tools available to all of us, we use email for way too many tools (I’m guilty too) from: Status updates, document management, calendaring, collaboration, social networking, and even for ‘conversations’.

Part of the reason I blog is that I can get my message, thoughts and story out to thousands of people in just about twice the amount of time it takes to write an email. My colleagues follow me on twitter, and often know where I’m at, what I’m doing. Scoble publishes his calendar so those he needs to interview can help schedule. Yet despite these, I, my colleagues, and Scoble and you likely have more email than can be consumed.

Ironically, most of my social media peers and I still use email as one of the main ways to communicate back and forth to each other But even more, there are more inboxes to check, twitter, facebook, linkedin, I’m getting business messages from these tools and I’m sure you are too.

So what’s the solution? It’s going to be part process, and part tools. Some have committed to responding to emails only in five sentences or less, and new tools like Xobni are starting to appear (I’ve requested a beta account)

Questions for you
1) How is your email intake? Can you handle it all?
2) How do you make your communications more efficient?
3) We’re headed to a hyper-connected world with an increase in communication channels, how will you cope?

Update: I’m all for solutions, and have found that aside from the excellent comments below, that some suggest to only check email twice a day (11am and 4pm) and to set that as an expectation. Colleague Julie Katz has announced an upcoming strategic report to help marketers how to understand how to reach those that are consumed. Hopefully, this email service vendor ClearContext promises to help with the problems.

68 comments

For 2 minutes, forget about these tools: Seesmic, Facebook, Ustream, Justin TV, Blogs, Forums, RSS, Utterz, and all the rest of the tools I listed out.

I’m seeing a lot of web strategists over focused on the tools. Secondly, I’ve even seen a few social media books written that focus in on the tools. While there’s a need for this type of focus, it should be at the end of your strategy, not the start.

In too many cases we focus on the next shiny objective, from this video player, to the new light mac book, to the newsfeed changes, or to the latest gizmadget. Only a few professionals out there can do this, like heat seeker Robert Scoble, and honestly, keeping up with him is just frantic, believe me, I should know.

Instead of honing in on the specific technology, you should approach developing your web strategy as you would building a house. Focus on who you’re inviting to come over to your property (websites) and what is it that they want (needs). Start there.

Next, think about the different rooms in your house, and how they all serve a different purpose, from the decor (branding), mailbox (blogs), front door (advertising), living room (chat rooms), and basement (document library), they all do something different. We use tools in a lot of different ways, some are great for attracting folks (advertising) some are great for making them stay (media and content), and some are great for encouraging them to interact (social tools). In any case, the value of each of these on their own is weak, and the real value is all of them together in context.

There’s a couple of ways to develop your strategy, one of which is to follow a methodology of framework, when I speak at events, I’ll often discuss the POST methodology, which focuses on people, objectives, strategy, then tools (and only in that order).

So stop fondling the hammers and nails, instead, focus on what’s really important, the guests you want to attract and what type of house they want.

13 comments

Twitter is one of the top referrers of traffic to my blog, over 2000 referrers from twitter to my blog in the last 30 days…there’s something happening there.

I’ve also noticed and increase of new users over the past 30 days, feel free to add me as a friend, I will add you back. (Update: I’m no longer adding anyone back, as it’s not time efficient for me to do this)

Twitter is becoming a major communication tool for me lately. There are more intimate conversations being held on this next-generation chat room, and it’s filled with early adopters and those who are trying to reach them.

If you’re not familiar with Twitter, my colleague Peter Kim recently did research on it, as well as recorded a podcast. I’ve also got a post up on why Twitter matters to the web strategist –it’s a quick start guide.

Here’s a few of the conversations I’ve been having in the last week

Just this morning we were debating the (lack of) user enterprise software debate

This past weekend I met over a dozen people who like the same type of music I do, and they recommended new artists to me.

News and information breaks on Twitter before it hits blogs

Last week I was on the phone with Francis Tapon, author and world traveler, he told me his secrets to getting paid to traveling the world, so I tweeted it to my 1900 followers.

I also share interesting links to content I’m reading, mainly around web and technology, as well as events I attend, much of this does NOT end up on my blog.

I’m starting to use Twitter like my link feed, why I find interesting I put on twitter, rather than on my google shared reader or my blog.

You won’t hear me talking about what I ate for lunch, but you will learn things about me that I’m passionate about –strategy, music, art, etc.

Who it’s for and who it’s not
If you’re in the tech industry, and in marketing, you should be paying attention to what’s happening on twitter. There’s even search tools that can help you find discussions and memes. Also, if you’re trying to reach early adopters, these are tools for you. This really reminds me of the the whole blogging industry in 2005, it’s the same type of pros and cons –it’s just much smaller now. If you don’t meet these criterion, then it may not be for you, always remember to find the audience you’re trying to reach first.

Hope to see you there, my profile is jowyang, and I’ll follow you back.

If you’re seeking more followers and want to connect with folks (once you get a few dozen active friends, a real ‘conversation’ starts) leave a comment below with your twitter name.

---

Update: I’ve tweeted to my network to add their name to this comment area if they want to connect with other folks (see my actual tweet) that are interested in social media+marketing+and are on twitter.

[The Fabric becomes stronger as the Threads connect]

In just a few minutes there are over 20 responses. This is testament to how rapidly things are evolving. Now the title of this post is needs to be modified: “Some conversations are moving to twitter..and back to blogs”

---

Update 2: Three hours since I’ve posed the first tweet pointing people here (Have about 50 new followers, and over 160 comments on this post, dozens of replies within twitter, became the top node on techmeme, as well as direct messages), and I’m getting messages that Twitter is slowing down as people are starting to add other, the fabric is growing. This is a good test of what could happen in an emergency, as folks were using Twitter to get messages out during the South CA fires a few months ago.

The viral activity in and around Twitter was amazing, people of like minded interests were leaving their twitter profile below, then connecting to each other at a rapid rate, it then spread the the blogosphere slowing both twitter.com and my blog.

There are echoes on the blogosphere too:

Why is Twitter Exploding? Because it’s A Conversation Ecosystem.

Jeremiah Owyang Causes Twitter Explosion

Twitter Traffic

Help! I’m Addicted to Twitter!

Twitter is a Conversation Ecosystem

My assumptions were right, there really is something happening in twitter, it’s clear it’s the desire to connect and communicate.

---

Update 3: The Day After
It’s very clear this was twitter storm resulted in meeting the objectives of getting folks to connect. I’m receiving messages and reading blog posts that many people now have added 20-100 followers or connections that they might have not been able to connect to previously, you can track the many incoming links from Technorati. Sadly, having a few hundred more contacts has flooded my mail inbox with notifications, but as promised, each person I’ve promised to follow and listen to in return. Lots of clicking to do this weekend.

Most importantly, the value of a network is determined by it’s size, yesterday (which some are calling ‘Twitter Tuesday’) resulted in a stronger fabric across the social network. All of the boats rose with the tide.

594 comments

Recently at our home, we purchased a new laptop, which came with Vista on it. Sadly, it didn’t come with Microsoft Office on it, and I was not able to open any word docs, excel, or powerpoints. I asked the store how much it would cost to add office, and they suggested in was $175. This seemed like a lot of money for a software system that I’m used to seeing as a base line image on most computers.

As a result (and being web savvy, of sorts) I started to use Google Docs, an online, ‘free’ version of office. Google offers an online spreadsheet tool, as well as an online document word processing tool, all with collaborative features that I could share with others.

As I continued to use these Google docs, I started to infect others, evangelism runs within my veins, and soon my wife started to use it, and I used it for a variety of documents within my new employer. I’m not sure if it’s becuase of me, but other colleagues in my team are using Google Docs for team collaboration. It’s not just Google either, Zoho is coming around the bend quickly, and had quite a presence at the recent Office 2.0 conference in SF that attendees were wondering why Microsoft was not present.

I wonder if Microsoft is missing a major opportunity here by: 1) Not providing these basic tools on the OS that buyers are not willing to purchase and 2) Not being agile to see how information is moving to the cloud and thus offering tools for the online office. When I do a google search for Microsoft online office, it results in thanksgiving colored templates.

Talking to Rafe of Webware (they believe in the web as a platform) he mentioned to me that the internet has made boxed software irrelevant, as users can now download them from the web, or use web versions of products.

What other software companies are missing an opportunity because of the web?

17 comments

Click To Play

A few weeks ago, I met some SF folks at Lunch 2.0 in SF (see pics of this rooftop party.

Randy Fong is a Flex champion and evangelist and gives us his reasons why he prefers to develop there. He tells us about the differences between Flex, Ajax, and Silverlight, and answers which one he thinks will have a faster development time.

I probed him about measurement, which has been a point of contention for many web strategists, he gives his response.

There’s a lot of web strategists reading this blog, tell me about which technology you’re using for rich user experiences and why.

4 comments

Click To Play

Editor in Chief (I flubbed the intro) of PC World Harry McCracken (personal blog) loves Flock, so much so that he gave me 2 minute of his time to tell me why. If you want to read his full review, it’s on PCWorld. Previously, I was unconvinced there was room for three browsers in my life, but downloaded it and gave it a whirl. The jury is still out, it takes me time to see if it will really integrate into my lifestyle. I received some feedback about it on Twitter, such as Dennis Howlett tweets “you realize Flock’s OPML import is utterly borked, rendering it almost useless?” amid a mixture of other responses.

One of the best part of the experience is the truly human experience, it’s so common that large and small companies are so visibly unhuman in their website experience. If you’ve any questions about flock, or need quick answers Evan Hamilton the community ambassador (who stepped in after Will Pate moved on) is available. Next time I see him, I’ll get him on video to find out how he’s enjoying being a community manager.

I met up with Harry at Eastwick Communication’s halloween party in Santa Clara, had a great time, met a lot of folks, pics are in flickr of the party.

Have you tried the latest version of flock? It has social features that hook into Facebook, Flickr, Blogging platforms, and Twitter.

2 comments

VoIP and Live Streaming, in my opinion, have revolutionized the communication industry. Anyone with computer and internet connection can connect with anyone else on the planet, for real time voice and video communications. The clincher? Such tools require a few dollars and commodity internet access –nearly everyone can get in on the conversation.

Skype connects a family
Recently, an Uncle and Auntie of mine recently moved to the Middle East for a off country teaching assignment, in a city known for violence, assassinations and unrest. Yesterday, during a local family get together we were able to arrange a time to call them, and we piped over a video stream to them. We could hear their audio only. I was able to briefly jump into this real world communications with them, as they were half way around the world, and wouldn’t be returning to us anytime soon.

My cousin showed him around the house with the video camera, although the wireless network connection would sometimes drop, they got to experience a virtual tour of what we were doing. Although not perfectly setup, we continue to lower the barriers to communication in real time, and the medium gets richer with each passing year.

Live streaming the human life cycle
I recently spoke with Chris Yeh, the CEO of Ustream (live interactive video), he tells me that in addition to people broadcasting live births on the web, that families are live-broadcasting funerals. Morbid? Not really, some family members who couldn’t be at the service get to participate in the grieving process, in this virtual way to be with their family.

What’s next?
It’s just a matter of time before our traditional home entertainment systems become IP enabled, allowing for PC to TV real-time video and audio to be transmitted. It would be interesting to see the adoption of these tools each holiday season, year after year.

Has VoIP or Live Streaming impacted your family?
There’s so many examples of how these tools impact business, but have you had an experience where these tools impacted your personal or family life? VoIP, live video streaming, what? Share with me in the comments.

6 comments

Click To Play

Leon writes a blog called LifeHack (not the same as lifehacker), and has a Technorati rank of 38! He focuses on helping people make their lives easier by using the web. We’re in Hong Kong’s central distract on the night of the blogger dinner.

I ask Leon three questions, hear how he responds by watching the embedded video above (Some feedreaders or emails won’t show this, so access the post directly)

1) With the flood of so many web 2.0 tools, how does one figure out which is right for them?

2) Email is broken. How do we manage the overflow?

3) Instant messaging, is it a productivity tool or waste of time?

If you’ve any questions for Leon, cruise over to his blog and fire away!

1 comment

There are quite few challenges for online newspapers, ranging from the reality of multiple authors and the usual workflow issues to creating editorial process. Christina Wodke, of Public Square, discusses some of the challenges facing digital newspapers (find out what she means by “Boxes and Arrows”).

No comments

A Web Strategy must balance all three spheres
What’s a Web Strategy? It’s the balance between the three spheres for effective long-term planning of a website. This person is a hybrid of a few roles, and may have emerged from any of the following spheres. A Web Strategist is responsible for the long-term planning and decision making of a website, but must balance ALL of the following three spheres:

1) Community (formerly Users)
The Web Strategist must understand (by using a variety of techniques and tactics) what users want. This is commonly known as User Experience Research which will create and craft a ‘mental model’. In addition, the strategist will need to be in tune with the community in which their website is part of, this is greater than just users, as it will include competitors, partners, and prospects.

Skills: User experience (UX), usability, information architecture, social media skills, customer support, community marketing, marketing, product marketing, ability to listen and be empathetic.

---

2) Business
The business sphere requires a strategist to understand the long term objective of a website and it’s goals. This sphere also requires ability to internally maneuver within an organization and maximize the persistent limitation in resources. A website that is not aligned to business or market objectives is ultimately doomed to fail. The User and Business requirements will often match, but will rarely ever be a perfect fit. The Web Strategist) will need to obtain business requirements from stakeholders, whether that be execs, sponsors, sales, or even shareholders. Understanding the market, competitors (and key milestones) and other external forces are also required –a business requirements model will be formed, these are your objectives.

Skills: Marketing, advertising, media, management, measurement, ability to evangelize internally, process management, resource management, obtain objectives, product development, product management, savvy in political maneuvering

---

3) Technology
Lastly, a Web Strategist needs to know how each and every tool and technology work, they’ll need to know the strengths, benefits, limitations and costs. This also applies to human capital, and timelines. Often technical limitations will reduce the scope of User and Business needs, so you’ll need to incorporate this going forward.

Skills: Software Development, Web Development, Web Architecture, Industry Trends, experiments with web technology, but understands how to extrapolate and harness a tool.

Can’t master them all? Be able to Learn or Delegate
It’s unlikely he or she is a master at all, but most importantly, has the ability to learn and delegate. In my career, I’ve tried to have a balance in all these spheres (former UI Designer, Marketing Degree, and worked in software engineering group) keeping up with all spheres is nearly impossible. Therefore two skills become very important: 1) The ability to quickly learn, and extract value, 2) Ability to find talent and delegate, no really, I mean really delegate, which requires trust.

If you have other skills to suggest, please leave a comment, and I’ll add.

Notes:
I originally introduced this concept August 25th 2006, just about one year earlier, and am now making these amendments. This was primarily spurred by Johnathan’s suggestion of looking at the user sphere as greater than just a customer base, thanks Jonathan, you’re an excellent strategist. Also, Robert suggested I try to incorporate more of a visual representation in my concepts, which I think is a great idea.

Additional Resources
Did this post interest you? See all posts tagged Web Strategy, or watch the supplemental Web Strategy Video Show.

51 comments

I’m getting asked a few times a week to recommend a White Label Social Networking Site by excited entrepreneurial or the corporate evangelist. I mainly get asked because of this list I made of the players, and my frequent commenting on the topic.

Given that there is over 60 of them, I don’t believe anyone has an accurate idea of which one ‘is the best’ and considering they are releasing upgrades are versions a few times a year, keeping up is a full time job, there’s where an industry analyst can step up and lead.

I can never answer you over email or over a single phone call, why? Because there are different tools for different needs. It would be very irresponsible of me to recommend SoNet without first understanding your business objectives, your community needs, and gathering your technological requirements.

Every company has different business, user and technology needs. I’ve observed that the different White Label Social Networking vendors are starting to segment into different strengths and focus, therefore there is no “perfect” vendor

So I recommend the following checklist before you get started on this very important decision (How important? This is the infrastructure for your customer base, you’d better choose wisely)

Questions to answer before contacting any White Label Social Networking site (feel free to add additional checkoff points below)

1) What business problem are you trying to fix? What’s broken? What does success look like (without mentioning features)

2) There are different tools for different problems, Are you sure a Social Networking site will fix this?

3) Where are your community/market/users currently?

4) Not sure? Then look again, don’t proceed farther until you find them.

5) Have you considered joining that community before creating your own? You know of the Walmart 10 week fiasco right? Trying to recreate MySpace doesn’t make sense because it already exists.

6) How open/closed to you want your community? Think about long term, does it scale?

7) What incentive are you creating with this SoNet that will drive users to your site and share?

8. How do you plan to kick start your community, you know that just because you build it, doesn’t mean they’ll come

9) Consider joining the Web Strategy Group in Facebook to meet other web decision makers, you’ll be able to ask questions in the forum.

10) Leave a comment below if you’ve suggestions.

I’m a big believer in using my blog (a one to many communication tool) to make my life efficient, so I may refer you to this post in request.

Consultants please read
Are you a consultant that focuses on evaluating, choosing, and implementing a solution? I encourage you to leave a thoughtful comment below that adds additional knowledge that will showcase and impress others, please no raw pitches. Perhaps add some addition points a buyer should look for.

9 comments

Click To Play

Lee from CommonCraft brings another great ‘understanding social media video’, I can’t thank him enough for this, I hope many of the corporate folks who are trying to understand these tools (often Digital immigrants) watch this series.

You can see other videos they’ve created on this wrap up post, great job, but I’ll have to agree with the folks in the comments, we want that signature “Boo” and “yeah” in every video.

5 comments

This post is a focus on the very front end of the adoption curve, long before the masses come, there’s many different groups inside of the “early adopter” persona. There’s been many extensive studies on the adoption curve and the different personas that emerge, but I’m just going to share what I see, as I’m close or in the epicenter. (I’m in Silcon Valley, and many of my friends are pebbles, or the CEOs that create these products demo in our office)

I see a pattern, and have grouped them into stages and patterns. For the purpose of this observation, I see a trigger area which I’m calling the ‘epicenter’, the point of an activity. There are many epicenters, in fact one or more for every product, and multiple companies having products. Individuals can often be many of the personas for each different product.

[Within the bleeding edge are different personas of adopters who all centralize around the epicenter: The Pebble, Swimmer, Surfer, Boater, or with the Fleet]

The Five Personas of the Early Adopter

The Pebble: One away from Epicenter:
First hand demo, for many truly first adopters, they will get a first hand demo from the originators of the product. They are hunted by marketing, inventors and PR professionals to be the key infuencers that will trigger the avalanche. In Robert’s case, his video show gets him access to just about every inventor and CEO. For example, Stewart from Flickr showed the product to him before many saw it.
These are the pebbles that gets dropped in the still lake.

Swimmers: Two away from Epicenter
Many folks are two degrees away, they watch a group of influencers and once a small critical mass has started (folks from group 1), they jump on. These are the hallway demos, or informal conversations using MicroMedia.

Surfer: Three away from Epicenter
Folks in existing connected networks that wait for several people in their peer group to move first, they are waiting for group gestures. We’re now looking at new social networking tools like Facebook. The interesting feature is that we can watch adoption of tools of folks on our network without directly interacting with them. The Facebook ‘news’ page has become a gesture model. By watching this flow of adoption we can see where the masses start to adopt tools, talk about them, and integrate them into their lives.

Boater: Four away from Epicenter
These folks wait for confirmation signals from the larger bubble to trigger them, they may not have time to experiment with tools, and will look for signals from blogs or industry news. This is not mainstream sources by any means, these are posts from blogs, podcasts, or email invites from friends. For many of the early adopters the signals from this group are often useful confirmation of what’s already happened.

With the Fleet: Five or more away from Epicenter
This is outside the bleeding edge. These group of folks adopt once the mainstream press as we know it, the NYT, Business Week, or when someone at their workplace or peers convince or show them. By the time they get to the tool, a community and network has already formed by the early adopters.

Many tools are not kept
Half of the shiny tools that the “One away” adopter get dropped by the way side, why? They find something better, or when they see folks from group three or four, they now consider it ‘uncool’ and feel compelled to move on.

Usage of tools for communication
There are different tools for different needs. It’s clear to me that email is one of the slowest, blogging is becoming more sluggish as new tools and MicroMedia start to take hold. Networks among the early adopters have already formed and solidified (like Facebook’s friends, Twitter, or Pownce) and the inner circle can quickly break and share news. It’s also worth reading Jeremy’s self-analysis as an early adopter Pebble or Swimmer. Also read Forrester’s research findings on Technographics to learn how mainstream adoption can be characterized.

My adoption style
I’m a bit more conservative (within the inner bubble within the bubble) of my tool adoption, only a few tools have I adopted and not kept up, I’m carefully watching the folks in group one, and often pull the trigger as a member of group two or three. I interviewed Chris Yeh, CEO of Ustream about a completely different topic, and he showed me Ustream a few days before Web 2.0 Expo (see meme). Now, I get many emails of beta products, way more than I have time to review, so I often go down this ladder. In many ways, I was very late to blogging (Boater) but I really grabbed it and focused a lot of energy into it, this domain you’re reading is just over a year old but has moved quickly.

Ustream: Pebble
Blogging: Boater
Twitter: Swimmer
Podcasting: Surfer
Video Blogging: With the Fleet
Facebook: Boater
Pownce: Swimmer then quit
SecondLife: Boater then quit

I watch these early adopters, watch how they break tools, and then I adopt. I mainly want to understand these tools so my clients won’t have to break them, but rather use them right. This means I don’t move in as fast as others, and come in and want to use these tools right. After telling Robert this he replied that he’s moving to “get away from people like you”, in his mind, being two or three from the epicenter is a late adopter, go figure. So what’s on my radar? I’ve been asked to be in group one for several products (some I’ve tried, and some not) and am even getting emailed or asked about yesterday’s topic on a bloggers union, which I’ll be sure to be in group four or more.

What Persona are you? The Pebble, Swimmer, Surfer, Boater, or with the Fleet?

[Want to get my signals? Add me to Facebook, Twitter, or Subscribe to this blog. If you’re a Web Strategist (You’re responsible for making decisions about a website) join the Web Strategy Group in Facebook]

25 comments

Remember geocities in the first boom? Well this tool doesn’t make your websites look as bad. Robert interviews the Jimdo team, a website that helps to create great looking and easy to deploy websites.

Want to get opinions from those that are reviewing it? I often use Technorati, type in the URL of the company, to look for opinions from bloggers, here’s a search of Jimbo.

3 comments

I’m starting to see this new type of tool and concept emerge as content gets created and distributed into many small and large buckets

Situation
Users are creating content, and often uploading, sharing, or producing to a wide variety of sites: social networks, image sites, movie sites, communication tools, blog software, forum software, etc. They are creating and consuming data on mobile devices, home computers and networks, work networks, and in public spaces. For the corporate brand, this means that media, text, voices, and opinions about a company are spread all across the wide web.

Problem
Information, data, and profiles are scattered around the web, and on different networks. While one person can be involved in many conversations around the web; tracking and managing them are very difficult as they’re scattered

[The desire to track and centralize data and media created on the disparte web is growing for both individual users and corporate brands. The need for Digital Lifestyle Aggregation rapidly approaches]

Concepts
A trend of tools are starting to come around, as they centralize all of those data points into one area, or make it easier to find. In many ways, it’s a dynamic blog roll of all ‘my stuff’. Marc Canter describes it in this early post (2004) as

“Navigating the complex worlds of multimedia, on-line content, communications, ecommerce and Home LAN based products is the key to understanding where we’re headed in the future. Enabling customers (both end-users and enterprises) to connect all of these disparate worlds, products and services together is what digital lifestyle aggregation is all about.”

In this definition, digital lifestyle aggregation is described as:

“A digital lifestyle aggregator (DLA) is a computer software application which integrates and centralizes the user control of all of the user’s information and electronic devices, including personal computers, Home LANs, cell phones, digital cameras, videogames, PDAs, and other forms of consumer electronics devices.”

Players
Techcrunch has started to track a few of these players, from Loopster along with Profilactic and ProfileLinker. Sonecast creates a single page of media, using aggregation techniques from disparate buckets.

The future
In many ways, we can expect existing feedreaders like MyYahoo and Google Reader and Facebook to start offering these types of tools. This feature set will become as common as the blogroll (and integrated with it), white label social networks and some solutions will provide password management, yet another form of identity, and yet another reason we need a single trusted form of user ID.

What this means for corporations
First of all, please don’t think you can control your brand, it’s not about that. But you’ll start to need these tools to, track, and centralize one’s brand (and everything associated around it) in a decentralized world. I’ve predicted that the future websites will be community based websites, so aggregating that content in one area helps to make you the first stop for product knowledge.

For further listening listen to this podcast interview between Dan Farber of ZDnet and Marc Canter they discuss the need for open networks, and thinking beyond Google, Yahoo, MS, Apple, and AOL.

Update: be sure to check out Chris’s ideas on Attention Streams, imagine haveing all your data on a single feed.

11 comments

Need to build an online community that collaborates?

I get asked by a lot of folks to provide recommendations for products, often there’s too many companies to keep analyze, so I make these lists and refer folks to them. One of my most popular index lists is the list of companies that provide White Label Social Networking solutions, in fact there’s over 60 in that space.

Requirements
Here’s a list of companies that provide collaboration platforms with turn-key social features for ‘instant’ community.

Collaboration tools and social features

Common features, but are not limited to, include: forums, wikis, blogs, media, rss, aggregation homepages, presence, instant messaging, and ability to connect to identity systems such as LDAP/Active Directory.

These tools may have social networking features, that’s optional, but should certainly scale to it.

These platforms can be used in intranets, extranets, or public communities.

Limitations: I am NOT seeking platforms which you could build these features on top of it, I’m really seeking a ready-to-go community suite. I’m seeking solutions to build community, not ERP systems (but if they have both, that could be included). See my list of web-based CRMs.

List of companies that provide collaboration platforms

Alfresco
“Alfresco is the leading open source alternative for enterprise content management. The open source model allows Alfresco to use best-of-breed open source technologies and contributions from the open source community to get higher quality software produced more quickly at much lower cost. Our goal is to not only provide an open source offering but to surpass commercial offerings in terms of features, functionality and benefits to the user community. Alfresco is built by a team of leading members from Documentum® and Interwoven® with 15 years experience in Enterprise Content Management (ECM), including the co-founder of Documentum. ”

Blogtronix
“Blogtronix is a social media platform for Enterprise 2.0 communication. We provide a single, unified system that includes blogs, wikis, and social networking. Unlike other companies, we are able to offer a product that’s easy to use, scalable and can be delivered either on-demand or as a software. We’re equipped with a rich feature set that includes vlogging, podcasting, flash as well as a fully customizable interface. Our applications range from corporate in-house collaboration to global user created networks. ”

Central Desktop
“Central Desktop provides simple project collaboration tools for business teams.
Our tools help your business organize and share information efficiently, communicate with others and collaborate on projects.”

CommunityZero by Ramius
“CommunityZero’s many features simplify community management and support group communication by making it easy for users to share information and knowledge online. Read on to learn more about these features.”

Drupal
“Drupal.org is the official website of Drupal, an open source content management platform. Equipped with a powerful blend of features, Drupal supports a variety of websites ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven websites.”

iUpload
“iUpload enables Internet-based business communities for the purpose of improving communications, enhancing customer relationships, driving sales opportunities and gathering marketing data.”

JiveSoftware
“We develop award-winning collaboration software that improves a company’s productivity through open collaboration among employees, partners and customers. We’re located in downtown Portland, Oregon.”

Lotus Connections, IBM
“IBM Lotus® Connections is social software for business that empowers you to be more innovative and helps you execute more quickly by using dynamic networks of coworkers, partners and customers.”

Pluck
“A leader in social media software solutions , Pluck helps transform how publishers, media sites and major brands engage their audiences and customers to discover, create and distribute information online. Providing the technologies for content generation, syndication, social networking and news personalization, Pluck helps its customers more easily consume and leverage the new open content model that has emerged as the cornerstone of Web 2.0.”

Sharepoint, Microsoft
“SharePoint Products and Technologies provide enterprise-scale capabilities to meet business-critical needs like managing content and business processes, simplifying how people find and share information across boundaries, and enabling better informed decisions. Using the combined collaboration features of Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Server 2007, plus the design and customization capabilities of Office SharePoint Designer 2007, organizations can enable their users to create, manage, and easily build their own SharePoint sites, and enable these sites to be discovered throughout the organization.”

ThoughtFarmer (For Intranets)
“Capture intellectual capital and strengthen workplace community with ThoughtFarmer social software for enterprise intranets. ThoughtFarmer combines the best of wikis, blogs, and social networking into an attractive, easy-to-use intranet solution for Windows server environments.”

Traction Software
“Founded in 1996, Traction® Software, Inc. (formerly Twisted Systems, Inc.) set out to eliminate the frustrating and costly inefficiencies in team communications and information management by creating a revolutionary web-based end-user hypertext journaling system. Traction TeamPage was first released in 1999 and, after commerical launch in July 2002, is the industry’s first and leading Enterprise Blog software. The software is deployed in leading enterprises, universities and many branches of the U.S. Government.”

Zoho
“Zoho is one of the brands from AdventNet, a software company started in 1996 focusing on building affordable software for businesses. AdventNet has served a diverse range of enterprise IT, networking and telecom customers. We know our customers have a choice of many vendors, and we want to earn their business and their trust by working hard for it. And having earned their business, we want to keep them happy so they will choose to do business with us again. These simple ideas have served us well, during good times and bad. AdventNet has achieved impressive growth, and has emerged as a rock-solid supplier and partner, with sound financials.”

Sosius
Sosius is an online workspace, accessible from any PC, that lets you create and collaborate. No software to buy and set up. Powerful and flexible yet easy to use.

Project Spaces
“Simple, secure and powerful web-based workspace to help your project teams, workgroups, committees, partners, and others quickly and easily connect, share and collaborate.”

Six Groups
“six groups enables you to start your own community for free, about every topic, available to everyone: Start immediately with a fully-enabled community, Define the data fields for your members’ profiles, Choose your design from a large variety of templates, Benefit from the six groups community.”

Web Crossing
“Web Crossing helps companies strengthen brands and build relationships. We are the innovative leader in Internet collaboration solutions used by online communities and project teams.”

YouFig
“Create your own secure collaboration communities branded & customized for your company, school or organization.”

There’s a bunch of companies that provide document management or email type systems, this isn’t that. If you know of other companies that should be on this list, please leave a comment.

Check out my other industry indexes for the modern and evolving web.

40 comments

To many marketeers and advertisers, nothing matters more than click stream data. While this has recently fallen under attack (as user engagement can be measured in ways that have nothing to do with clicks) there’s still a need to observe the holistic experience by using a wide variety of tools.

Crazy Egg is one of those tools for your chest to use in your ways of finding out what users are doing, and guess what? There’s a free limited version that can get you started on your homepage. Crazy Egg is a heat map tracker, which means it will help to tell you the story of WHERE your users clicked on your site and WHEN. This is yet another tool in the web measurement toolset.

“Crazy Egg makes it easy to: Test different versions of a page to see which works better, Discover which ad placement gives the best results, Find out which design encourages visitors to click deeper, Learn which content leads to improved sales”

Useful features: The overlay helps you to find out what was clicked and when did it happen? (after how long) The confetti tool was interesting, as you can clearly see exactly where users clicked on your site.

What did I learn?

I knew that my index page was used frequently on my blog (google analytics tells me this) and now I can confirm that they click on the upper left area of my banner.

I also learned that users click on the ‘more comments’ section on my post, rather than clicking on the title text, maybe I should bring more attention to that to make it easier to find.

People want to know who I am and often click on my profile link, but not my ‘face’ which goes to the same page, interesting.

Users also went to previous pages (down at the bottom of my blog), maybe I should display more posts per view.

It appears that users were clicking on the Guy Kawasaki ustream player

Please remember that this is just one tool of many that you should be using to gauge your website, don’t forget, the most important one is to just ask your users what they think.

I recommend you try this free tool for your blog, your company homepage, or consider expanding and purchasing it for major landing pages, another great free tool that should be in your arsenal of Web Analytics, Feed tracking, Google Alerts, and Technorati.

Recommended Reading

Handbook: Observing the User Experience (I’ve used this book quite a lot when I was a web manager)

All posts tagged User Experience

All posts tagged Web Analytics

Crazy Egg Dashboard

Overlay screen: After installing a script, CrazyEgg will track your site, and let you see a realistic overlay

Overlay screen with exploded flyouts that provide additional info

Heatmap shows high area of clicks on your site

This “Confetti” feature shows with pinpoint accuracy where users clicked.

6 comments

My former CTO, Hu Yoshida at Hitachi Data Systems wrote an interesting post of why he hopes he never has to have a Terabyte of data centralized at his home. I agree.

I’m a web guy, and I want my data out on the cloud (that means in the amorphous web), this means that I can access it whenever, and from wherever, assuming we keep on developing in the mobile space and everywhere else we seem to be plugged into the web.

In addition to utility, there’s the benefit of not having to worry about having a centralized source of data being stolen from your home, or lost during a natural disaster, it should all safely be out on the cloud.

The challenge of course is that data has a few concerns, security, and privacy of all that information on a foreign server. Every time we make advances in technology there are trade offs. In this case, not being sure of where one’s data is, or who is accessing it is always a risk, but I’ll take it.

It’s so interesting to see the intersection of Data Storage and the Web Industry, if you want to learn more about data storage, check out this Data Storage Wiki I created over a year ago.

So write me back, where do you want your data?

1) On the cloud
2) Centralized at home
3) A hybrid of both
4) Don’t care

If you want to talk more about the web cloud, join us in person, Hitachi Data Systems is hosting a Mixer, see you there!

8 comments