The Role of Informal Learning in the New Workplace

In a world where knowledge has become increasingly perishable, people learn best through a combination of having the right knowledge in the right context with the right people. Knowing the right people to ask the right question has more power than knowing all the answers. The process of managing informal learning in an organization is commonly achieved through the deployment of Social Learning solutions. Nurturing and harnessing informal learning enables organizations to surround their people with structured and unstructured learning experiences so they can easily access what they need to learn and what they want to learn.

The workplace is, more often than not, now a place of shifting needs and responsibilities rather than a hierarchy set of jobs with interchangeable people to fill a structured set of job titles. Saba Social Learning is built to adapt to the changing nature of work.

Tag it, share it, discuss it, bookmark it, contribute it, add classmates to the group: the social experience of learning is flexible and boundless. Combined with the strength of formal learning, these experiences engage learners and accelerate how fast people learn. Further Saba Social Learning’s “always on” experience reinforces how learners change behavior and put learning into practice.

Accelerate your sales cycle with Sales 2.0

For those of you who have an interest in improving your sales process I highly recommend Anneke Sele’s book Sales 2.0 at http://www.amazon.com/Sales-2-0-Innovative-Practices-Technology/dp/047037375X/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

Having rolled-out the first Oracle web site in the 90’s, in a (very successful) effort to increase the penetration of the Oracle database in the mid-market, I had the opportunity to work very closely with Oracle’s inside sales organization. I later took advantage of this experience to design Siebel’s enterprise CRM software, which gave me the privilege to work with some of the most talented companies who were trying to build great sales organizations and were striving to integrate the multiple channels of customer communications!

I certainly wish that Anneke Sele’s book had been available at the time as it very clearly and realistically explains and underscores how successful sales organizations need to use contemporary technology and while codifying processes from prospect inquiry to customer close. Anneke’s emphasis on a common lead framework between sales and marketing is right on! Don’t wait to implement a low-latency sales cycle: Implement Sales 2.0 now.

Increasing sales velocity though Enterprise Social Networks: FICO

At the interface of main street and Wall Street, FICO (previously known as Fair Isaac) caters both to consumers and businesses and delivers a wide range of predictive analytic solutions. The company generates more than half of its B2B leads from digital marketing through a very deliberate use of social networks both, private and public.

The main reason social networking is so important to FICO is that it enables both prospects and customers to educate and inform themselves by communicating with other similarly minded people in a safe and semi-structured environment, in their own language, 24/7. My strategy was to build FICO’s own private enterprise social network, decisions.fico.com, and to use public social networks like YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/user/FICOTechTalk#p/u, LinkedIn and Twitter to attract potential participants. This strategy, coupled with a user interface focused on maximizing positive user experience, has been very successful. In a very short period of time, we’ve managed to attract thousands and thousands of professionals to join FICO’s online-community the world over.

This project is a real-life example of how to put cloud computing to work to enable and facilitate customer engagement: By inviting our customers to become our most valuable collaborators with regard to defining new product requirements and other enhancements to our services.

FICO’s private enterprise social network, decisions.fico.com, was launched in a matter of weeks. It uses Salesforce Ideas and Lithium Customer Community applications. It integrates with Six Apart’s Typepad, Amazon EC2 and Sharepoint. The vision that lead to this strategy sprang from the marketing team working in very close collaboration with the CIO. The bulk of the implementation for this cloud-based composite application was outsourced to Salesforce’s partner, Reside.

The community is open to everybody using or evaluating FICO technology and services such as Chief Risk Officers, business analysts, developers and many others. Demos, free trials, and best practices are all a click away. Expanding he FICO community from the physical world to the digital world has been a very worthwhile investment! And, let’s not forget that for the customer‘s experience to be successful, the interaction must be multi-channel and consistent both on-line and in-person.

Consumer empowerment and FICO scores

Understanding FICO scores is critical for Consumers who want to take back control of their credit. Indeed, FICO scores are now used not only by lenders when purchasing a car, buying or refinancing a house but also by more and more employers as a measure of character and financial responsibility! In the Forbes video below with Quentin Hardy, I share where to get help to keep your FICO scores up so that you can get the best possible deal on your mortgage and the job you want.

Salesforce's Tour de Force

On Jan. 17, I attended Salesforce’s Tour de Force at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The two keynote speakers were Marc Benioff and Marc Andreessen. The event was billed as an unprecedented meeting of the minds of the two Marcs sharing their vision for the future of on-demand platforms.

It was a very good event, well organized and high-energy as one would have expected! However, it was focused on the launched of Force.com, the platform -as-a-service, that had been announced at Dreamforce last September. This was a bit of a disappointment as I had been expecting the announcement of a partnership between Ning and Salesforce.com. As I have written before (see Ultimate Networks, Jan. 1, 2008) I believe that social networks could significantly benefits B2B processes. Instead, Marc Andreessen squarely positioned Ning as a consumer centric social network platform. I had misread the tea leaves…

But not to despair, there is a Los Angeles company that provides what seems to be quite an interesting offering to build customer communities – http://www.thinkpassenger.com/ – Passenger combines social networking, collaboration and analytics technologies in a single platform. Passenger’s vision is to change the way companies collaborate with their customers, stakeholders and peers across social, geographic and organizational boundaries.

It certainly is a tall order but most definitely transformational and worth a try!

Where in the World are Laure Manaudou and Hope Solo?

Laure Manaudou is a French Olympic, European and world champion swimmer. Hope Solo is a goal keeper for the US Women’s National Soccer team. Both are very successful athletes whose notoriety has reached far beyond their respective sports. Laure Manaudou‘s new found fame was generated by a humoristic piece entitled “Laure Manaudou Sex Video” on YouTube that drew more than 1M viewers. The joke is that the video was about monkeys and fortunately not about Laure Manaudou. Because of all the attention it garnered, Laure Manaudou was also in the top 5 searches on Technorati for quite some time…

As for Hope Solo, she gained tremendous publicity through her temporary exile from the U.S. Women’s National Team. Indeed, her exile became the dominant story line at the 2007 FIFA Women’s World Cup. Unbeaten Hope Solo was benched by the coach in favor of veteran goalkeeper Briana Scurry just before a crucial semifinal game against Brazil that the US ended up loosing. USA today reported that this incident drove up ESPN’s ratings and filled blogs and comment pages with a passion not seen since the big USA win at the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup and Brandi Chastain’s jersey toss. In addition, there was a back-story to this incident recounting Hope Solo’s relationship to her father and his tragic passing a few months before the World Cup.

I’m relating these two “soap” stories to illustrate how public attention – though ever so short term- is driven by what I’d call the phenomenon of “Tribal Voyeurism”. I believe that it is critically important for B2B marketers to research and understand the mechanics of “Tribal Voyeurism”. Indeed, the glaciers between the B2C and B2B worlds, if they ever existed, are definitely melting! They’re melting not because of global warming but because, as noted before, of the ever increasing use of social media tools in the enterprise. Moreover, the hyper-mediatized “prosumer” has been completely saturated and become indifferent to the un-imaginative, un-inspired gobbledygook prose dished out by the vast majority of B2B marketers, and is hungering for a more genuine and entertaining style of communication!

I’m by no means suggesting that B2B marketers should become unsavory, voyeuristic, and soapy, but rather that they need to learn to appreciate and accept how professionals access and evaluate information. There are many successful companies that have succeeded in attracting and keeping the public interest either through style, meaning or both. This includes the likes of Apple, Salesforce.com, Facebook, PG&E (yes, the utility company), Interface and many others. So, break the mold. Create. Imagine. And have some fun!

Ultimate Networks

For some odd reason (Facebook anyone?), I celebrated New Year’s Eve embroiled in a heated conversation debating the merits (or lack thereof) of on-line social networks. One side of the argument was defended by very accomplished academics and the other by very successful and pragmatic business folks.

I don’t intend to recant all the details of this rather entertaining argument, but instead I’ll attempt to net-it-out while sharing with you my vision of how to make good use of these networks in a - social media- marketing context.

Of course, this enlightened crowd was well aware of the fact that new media can generate a non-local community and that this phenomenon isn’t new at all! In fact, if Wikipedia has it right, scholars associated with the Royal Society of London had already formed a community through the exchange of letters in the 17th century.

My objective, in the conversation, was to move past the theory of social networks and explore the use of today’s electronic social networks as tools for business. I don’t know about you, but I have neither the interest, nor the time to write notes on Facebook’s walls or share my daily activities on Twitter. There is way too much clutter and noise as it is!

My interest in professional social networks was first triggered some time ago when I was deeply involved in designing customer satisfaction and customer reference programs at Oracle and Siebel Systems. Invariably, the results, of these then state-of-the-art programs were very structured, contrived and certainly not real-time… Yes, they made great slides and gave an impression of control, however, the fact is that such programs are expensive, infrequently conducted, do not always distinguish between buyers, users or other influencers, are of very limited use for timely fixes of problems or for product development, and most certainly are a huge pain to customers.

My vision is to replace these static, non-interactive, memory-less programs by leveraging modern social network platforms. [I’m using platform in the sense of open APIs that run in the environment created by the social network (Facebook, Linkedin)]. As we develop these newly conceived programs across multiple social networks we should be able to identify lurkers, novices, regulars or other change agents and leaders, as well as, implicit or explicit unmet customer needs. Imagine: No need to get IT involved, no extra budget, self declared participation, and always-on interaction with your customers, very cool indeed!

I got the feeling that several in the conversation thought that some of these needs were already being addressed via the traditional technical on-line support groups, as well as, by public forums like Dell’s “Idea Storm” (www.ideastorm.com) and Salesforce’s “Success Force” (success.salesforce.com). Some also felt that the presently available tools like dynamic network analysis (DNA) and multi-agent systems (MAS) are only suited for very large networks. Perhaps my friends are correct and the currently available statistical tools do not lend themselves well to the analysis of smaller social networks. And certainly, “Idea Storm” and “Success Force” are steps in the right direction.

However, I’m still convinced that once social network portability takes hold we will be able to develop and use a suite of analytical applications that will help us better understand the quality and intensity of the relationships between network participants, as well as, brand sentiment and the role of influencers in shaping opinions. More important however, is that the potential benefit to business of such digital interaction optimization applications is huge! So, rather than waiting for Facebook, Linkedin and others to agree on a “Social Network Interop Protocol”and extend their applications, let’s use current web2.0 tools like Ning, Scout Labs, Umbria, Omniture, Google Analytics and other widgets to deploy the new CRM and create competitive advantage!

YouTube and Viewer Responsiveness Index

Today, it was too cold for me to go on a bike ride... Instead, I played sleuth and joined the digital natives on YouTube! I explored the correlation between “brand” and the number of video viewers for a selected set of companies. The results were quite surprising! The companies I selected are enterprise apps companies Oracle and SAP, Internet juggernauts Yahoo and Google, Salesforce.com as the enterprise 2.0 proxy, FaceBook as the Social Network / Internet platform, and Microsoft as Microsoft.

In an effort to remain objective, I chose to be very quantitative. I added up the number of viewers for the first five videos for each company, sorted by “relevance” and “all time”, as well as the number of comments and ratings. I then created a ratio that I call the “Viewer Responsiveness Index” – VR Index – to characterize the engagement of the viewer vis-à-vis the video.

Et voila, the winner on total views is FaceBook with more viewers than Google and Microsoft combined! And, first place for the VR Index goes to Microsoft with a score of 3.80, but keep on reading as the numbers themselves aren’t the whole story.

Indeed, quantitative analysis is great but it can only take you so far. So let’s enter a more subjective and qualitative world.

Oracle and SAP have the worst VR Index which may be explained by the fact that their videos are geared at techies and that watching a video about SAP NetWeaver or Oracle Fusion doesn’t necessarily generate a lot of excitement. By contrast, Salesforce.com videos are packed with humor and more fun to watch. So, while total viewership is the lowest of the companies surveyed, Salesforce generates a VR Index of 3.41 with mostly positive comments!

So by now you must be thinking: How is it possible for Microsoft to obtain such a high VR Index? Well, if you work in Marketing at Microsoft, don’t get too smug… The most watched video for Microsoft is Microsoft Surface Parody with 1,550,904 viewers. And, Punish Your Microsoft Developer garners 214,280 viewers alone… I guess people like to make fun of the Redmond Empire.

Google’s technical videos got a little bit more traction than Oracle’s or SAP’s, but what really boosts Google’s numbers are the Google Earth videos that all told reach nearly 2,000,000 viewers. As for Yahoo, the number of total viewers would have fallen below 80,000 if it weren’t for a Japanese video called Hard Gay Japan with 203,392 viewers.

So, where am I going with all of this? One thing is for sure, as the video-web becomes more important than the text-web, companies will need to keep an eye or two on what’s happening on YouTube. And while one could argue that comparing Oracle to Google in the context of YouTube is not meaningful, I hope that everybody will agree that comparing Google to Yahoo is very relevant! The unresolved question is whether the VR Index is a backward or looking-forward indicator.

OK, it’s time for me to bring my daughters to soccer practice. Happy holidays!

How far can you reach with IPTV?

Do you think that IPTV is television over the Internet?

If you said yes, sorry to disappoint, but you loose. IPTV stands for Internet Protocol Television. It’s a transport mechanism that telephone companies and cable operators use to deliver a television like experience. For now, most of the operator-deployed IPTV systems are designed to be walled gardens.

The systems operators want to deploy in walled gardens to ensure quality of service (QOS) and limit hacking and piracy. IPTV over the public Internet is called “streaming video”. As mentioned in a previous post, Shelly Palmer describes these technologies and their application very well in “Television Disrupted”.

A predictable quality of service and control over content aggregation is very critical for advertisers as they want to enhance the viewing experience and protect their brand. They also want to have as good a knowledge as possible of who is viewing their ads. IPTV offers a two-way system that allows for census based measurement – as opposed to sample based like AC Nielsen – and transactional user experience. In addition, the deployment of IPTV systems on video game platforms, portable video devices, and the growing adoption of DVRs allows for a consumer-based time-shifted experience.

This is, pardon the cliché, a true paradigm change! Clearly, to be effective in this new framework requires to think in terms of addressable and dynamic ads… It also requires having tremendous creativity and imagination, as well as, good processes to keep budgets under control. I find this so very exciting: Better knowledge, more imagination and more fun!

If you think that I’m getting carried away, take a look at the IPTV Subscribers Wordwilde 2006-2011 forecast from iSuppli Corporation and eMarketer from April 2007. The survey predicts the number of subscribers worldwide to grow from roughly 4 million in 2006 to over 100 million in 2011, with 45% of the viewers in Europe, 39% in Asia and 16%in the Americas.

The Video Web - Better, Faster and Cheaper

In a survey published in Sept. 2007, McKinsey confirmed that marketing executives around the world were moving online across the spectrum of marketing activities, from building awareness to after-sales service and that they see online tools as an important and effective component of their marketing strategies! However, the use of wikis and virtual worlds was more limited because of an absence of meaningful metrics.

Also, McKinsey reported that spending on digital advertising was set to increase significantly. The video ads category was the fastest growing with 74% of the respondents saying that they would increase spending over the next three years.

As discussed previously, I believe that one of the reasons for the expected growth is the maturity of content creation tools as well as more reliable delivery options (CDNs). Tools and services that facilitate the management and tracking of the digital assets (watermark, fingerprinting,…) at a lower cost and with a better experience for the viewers.

Akamai, with Stream OS, outputs video in multiple formats, so content provider don’t have to manually reformat outgoing content for each type of recipient. Moreover, the metadata attached to video and audio content includes rules and cue for how the content should be distributed, as well as description for search engines. BitTorrent, previously synonymous with digital piracy, announced early October a new enterprise CDN product called BitTorrent DNA. BitTorrent DNA is designed for publishers seeking ways to overcome slow downloads and choppy video streams. Brightcove is the first customer for BitTorrent DNA.

In addition many other more recent vendors like Joost, Babelgum, BitGravity and Rinera Networks continue to improve both QOS and Digital Asset Management at a frantic pace.

The Video Web and New Product Introduction

When I created the first on-line presence for Oracle in 1994 / 1995 with the Oracle Store, the web was essentially text-based, not very interactive and banner ads barely getting started. Many companies were either reluctant or afraid of using this new media! Well, we are now well into Web2.0 and more accessible technology and maturing business models are opening the floodgates for video on the web. I’m thinking specifically about the Enterprise in a business-to-business context.

At the MIT’s Enterprise Forum’s Brave New Web conference in February, Jeremy Allaire Brightcove’s CEO was saying that the Internet was rapidly moving from a “text web” to a “video web”. I couldn’t agree more. He added that Brightcove was developing several “social media” additions to work with its video hosting and distribution system. This type of technology will allow viewers to participate in the creation of content and therefore enable interactivity.

Imagine how corporations who embrace and master the “video web” could dramatically re-invent the way they do new product introduction, partner and employee training, as well as facilitate customer’s adoption! Unfortunately, I’m developing a certain sense of déjà-vu… Yet again, very few have the imagination and creativity to think “video” mode and are still in the animated Microsoft’s Powerpoint mode… I guess that we are still in the classic Geoff Moore’s early adopter phase and that the tornado hasn’t arrived yet!