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Just Shut Up And Listen? Part 2

Published: Apr-06-10

By: Kishore Swaminathan

How can a company take advantage of these fundamental changes in communication? Here are some relatively simple things to keep in mind, along with actions you can take immediately.

1. Not only are your employees, customers and competitors all talking and talking openly—so are your competitors’ employees and customers, and customers you never knew you had. Technology exists to process unstructured text for you to listen to them all—and listen at an industrial scale—enabling you to gauge your customers’ latent needs, how they feel about your products and brand, and what your competitors are up to. There’s no reason to spend money on surveys anymore: Everything you want to know—and more—is out there in the open for you to harvest. With technology from vendors such as Sentimine and The Nielsen Co., companies ranging from carmakers to agribusinesses are monitoring and measuring customer sentiment over the Web.

2. Embrace video as a communication medium. If you are like most companies, you produce tons of written instruction manuals in multiple languages and package them with your products. Very few of your customers read them, in any language. With video, you can show them rather than tell them. The Home Depot, Dell, Best Buy and many others are increasingly turning to video as a means of customer support.

3. Create an online community of people who use, like, love—and, don’t forget, hate—your products. Facilitate but don’t dominate the conversation. Face it: Whatever your product or service may be, it’s just a small part of your customers’ lives. By creating as much conversation as you can among your customers about as many subjects as possible, you’ll ensure that your products become legitimate topics of conversation from time to time. This kind of publicity is more genuine and credible than any ad campaign you can run.

4. Caution: A good, active community is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, your community members are your ambassadors. On the other, your community is effectively offering your customers to your competitors on a platter as well as a forum where your disgruntled customers can complain. The bigger your community is, the more vulnerable you are. Which is why you need to create and support brand ambassadors.

*Kishore Swaminathan is the chief scientist for Accenture.

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Just Shut Up And Listen?

Published: Apr-02-10

By: Kishore Swaminathan

Remember how simple it was to communicate with your customers in the good old days? You initiated and managed specific conversations about your company and your products. For example, you could buy a couple of 10-second spots during the Super Bowl. Or you could entice customers to participate in focus groups and fill out surveys. Whatever the medium or venue, you ensured that in any conversation about you, you were the subject as well as the object. Things have changed. Today, your customers are having various kinds of conversations among themselves out in the open. They write blogs; they argue with each other in bulletin boards; they tweet on Twitter about whatever; they post videos of their kids online; they talk about their lives and feelings in social networks. And they post reviews and commentaries about you. In other words, you no longer manage the conversations among your customers in which your company or products may be mentioned, often in unpredictable contexts. What’s a brand-conscious company to do? Just shut up and listen? No. But in light of this significant social change, companies need to recalibrate the way they see their marketing, branding and corporate communications.

Discontinuities

Successful technologies often create discontinuities between the past and the present that go well beyond the technologies themselves—discontinuities in individual and social behavior that alter some aspect of society forever. Here are some examples of how recent advances in information technology are leading to important changes in how we communicate and consume information.

From “need to know” to “good to know”:

Quaint as it may seem, communication used to have a purpose—typically, to convey information that I needed to tell and you needed to know. No longer. Technology now gives me an extraordinary ability to talk a lot about nothing to no one in particular for no reason.

As a result, communication today is less a matter of my decision about what to tell whom than it is about your choice of what to pay attention to from whom.

From “tell me” to “show me”:

Cheap digital and cell phone cameras that can shoot video plus free distribution media such as YouTube are fueling an explosion in video communication. Want to know how to fix your plumbing? Or learn how to make a Mexican tamale or play the guitar? Perhaps you’d like to see how arthroscopic surgery is done?

Today, on the Web, you can find video clips—by amateurs as well as professionals—on almost any subject.

From “talk at you” to “talk with you”: Not long ago, when producing and distributing information was relatively expensive, organizations ranging from companies to hospitals to governments controlled, and were at the center of, the communication with their public. By necessity, they talked at you. Today, two-way dialogue is not only possible but almost expected by individuals from these same organizations— especially from doctors and health care providers.

In my next post, I will share how companies can take advantage of these fundamental changes in communication.

*Kishore Swaminathan is the Chief Scientist of Accenture.

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Stop Looking for Web 3.0 – It's Already Here and Open for Business

Published: Mar-26-10

By: Michael Redding

Ever since Tim O’Reilly, et al., coined the term “Web 2.0” to describe the second major wave of web technologies, use cases, and business models, technologists, sociologists, and futurists have all struggled to be the first to plausibly identify and characterize what comes next. I would assert, and I am probably not the first, that the proverbial “Web 3.0” has in fact already quietly emerged, and just like Web 1.0 and 2.0, represents significant opportunities for enterprises that are prepared to aggressively pursue innovative business strategies.

To set the stage for this hypothesis, let’s first take a look at what attributes have emerged to define the current “web”:

- A network designed for a limited audience / purpose that has been exploded in scale and expanded in purpose

- Initial limited functionality (data networking) being expanded to become a broad multi-modal communication medium for individuals and corporation

- Information sharing expanded from simple binary/text to graphical content, photos, audio, video

- Expansion of messaging capabilities from asynchronous to fully synchronous, real-time, streaming

- Single geography expansion to global reach

- Emergence of standards and interface schemas (XML) to facilitate integration of heterogeneous systems

- Text morphed to flat HTML and now becoming robust Rich Internet Applications (RIA)

- Static content home pages evolved to storefronts and now rapidly transforming into eCommerce

- Revenue derived from eCommerce and ad sales

- SPAM, Scams, privacy concerns, and viruses

And while my categorization may not be perfectly complete nor exactly precise I think it conveys the point. So, given all this, what is Web 3.0? Well, I’m suggesting Web 3.0 is in fact effectively a “parallel web” that has emerged, has taken on and mimicked many of the classic web attributes, has seen explosive early growth, and is poised to become a major economic engine and ecosystem in its own right. And just what is this magic, wonderful, parallel web of the future? FACEBOOK.

Let’s run it down (note: stats are all based on my recall of stuff I read on the internet so they must be true. Check your favorite search engine for more actual, accurate, and timely facts and figures):

- Started as an on-campus tool to replace hard copy “freshman facebooks” with a closed online network -> now more than 380+ million users including my mom

- On-campus people networking via the web -> global people networking, games, community sites, commerce, chat, public & private groups, mobile (>65 million users), XBox 360 (2million users in the first week)

- Simple basic UI (still predominantly in place) -> more photos than Flickr, videos, wall art

- Messaging: wall-to-wall, “poke”, IM, live voice

- Geographic expansion -> usage globally close to, if not yet exceeding, use in the US

- Facebook Connect: 80,000+ websites use to exchange data with Facebook and other sites

- Mostly a “flat” experience – site decorations are the “flaming icons” of the web circa 1997. (we’ll see how the UI progresses)

- eCommerce: Enterprises have been able to build “fan pages” and now can build full-fledged storefronts (www.bigcommerce.com)

- Revenue? VC funds, ad dollars, and the game vendors sure seem to be making some measureable cash.

- SPAM (Mafia Wars / Farmville updates), Scams? (http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-gaming-ecosystem-of-hell/), privacy concerns (Facebook “Beacon” anyone?), viruses = yes

So to wrap it up, Facebook is the web of 1999 with an extra 11 years of technology and social change mixed in – explosive growth, tons of potential for those enterprises willing to make a move, baseline capabilities in place, active re-definition of online behaviors, and nothing but upside. Now if we can collectively help it to avoid becoming the web of 2001!

PS. A topic for further discussion and debate: at what point does Facebook become a legitimate Google threat? The debate is already raging…

* Michael Redding is the Director for Accenture Technology Labs. He can be followed on his Twitter account, @michaeljredding.

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