During the past 10 years, a number of software products used by online professionals have been discontinued. When this happens, customers are ultimately forced to spend time on product selection again as well as on a costly and risky migration exercise. Killing a product might make commercial sense for the vendor, but customers are left …

The Center for
Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth conducted a
study on social media by Nora Barnes and Eric Mattson on the usage of social
media in fast-growing corporations. All interviews took place in October and
November of 2009. The 2009 study looks again at the Inc. Magazine 500 social
media usage for the third consecutive year, allowing for a longitudinal study
of corporate use of social media.

In 2007, the study
found that the Inc. 500 was outpacing the more traditional and larger Fortune
500 companies in their use of social media. For example, with blogs, the 2007
some research showed that 8% of the Fortune 500 companies were blogging compared
to 19% of the Inc. 500. This difference continued in 2008 with 16% of the
Fortune 500 blogging vs. 39% of the Inc. 500. And it appears the Inc. 500’s
lead in blogging will continue in 2009 with the Inc. 500 now blogging at a rate
of 45%.

This research shows that
social media continues to penetrate parts of the business world at a fast rate.
In all three studies, questions looked at with six prominent social media
(blogging, podcasting, online video, social networking, message boards and
wikis).  In 2009, several new tools
were added including Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, and MySpace.

Social networking continues
to be the most familiar social media tool to the Inc. 500 with 75% of
respondents in 2009 claiming to be “very familiar with it” (compared to 57% in
2008). Twitter’s has captured “share of mind” in the first year of being
studied with sixty-two percent of executives reported being familiar with it.

Looking across the three
years, social networking and blogging have have continued to grow in adoption,
the use of message boards, online video, wikis and podcasting has leveled off
or declined. The addition of Twitter (considered by respondents to be both a
microblogging site and a social networking site) in the latest study shows that
52% of the Inc. 500 companies are already using this tool for their business.

Forty-three percent of the
2009 Inc. 500 reported social media was “very important” to their
business/marketing strategy and 91% of the Inc. 500 is using at least one
social media tool in 2009 (up from 77% in 2008). In addition, as they ramp up
their usage, the Inc. 500 companies are also seeking to protect themselves
legally, with 36% having implemented a formal policy concerning blogging by
their employees.

This is consistent with
other studies I have seen in the past two years. It is nice to see the
continued increase in social media use by business. It also makes sense. 

Alterian has conducted its
seventh annual survey on online marketing. This year’s sample covered 1068
marketing professionals worldwide. It found that 66 percent of respondents will
be investing in social media marketing in the next 12 months. Where is the
money coming from in an ear of tight budgets? The survey found that 40 percent
of those investing in social media marketing said they would be shifting more
than a fifth of their traditional direct marketing budget towards funding their
social media marketing activities. This supports other statistics from the
Alterian survey that found that the majority of respondents (67 percent) feel
social media is either ‘increasingly important’ or ‘critical to success.’ I have seen similar results in other studies and through my own experience. 

The survey also found
that 36 percent of respondents are investing in social media monitoring and
analysis tools. It is a growing field and I have discussed a number of them on
this blog. This is a significant percentage, considering the maturity of the
channel. It appears to reflect a growing understanding that a social media
marketing strategy needs to be based on listening to customers and prospects
and its ROI needs to be measured. However, the 64 percent who are not planning
this investment may be left behind, as you need to see what impact your efforts
achieve, as well as what customers are saying about you.

The research also
explored the importance of customer engagement, a critical component to success
in the opinion of many, a view I share. It found that over half of respondents
(51 percent) are placing a ‘fair’ or ‘significant’ amount of effort on moving
from a campaign-centric direct marketing model towards multi-channel customer
engagement – in fact only 7 percent are making no effort at all.  This is good news.

The Web and social
media continues to change marketing, whether it is for products or politicians.
The same holds for traditional news media as many long time news providers have
found out too late. It appears that some marketing professionals have awakened
to this change and are making steps to take advantage of it. 2010 will be an
interesting year for business applications of social media, both inside and
outside the enterprise.

Artsetter is a Paris based online art gallery. I have now been accepted as one of their artists. I had to go through a voting process
and I appreciate those of you who voted for me.  Now I put up an initial gallery of 24 paintings. I will add
more and perhaps some drawings and photos.

I encourage you to visit the Artsetter site and
comment on my work as feedback is really appreciated. When you get to the site
you can find my gallery under the gallery tab. For now it is listed in new
galleries but that may evolve.

 Here is what I wrote in my
profile. I paint with acrylics and also do simple line drawings. My focus
is directly painting what I see. The goal is not photo realism but an
integration of painting and seeing. I primarily do still life or painting from
a model at the moment. I have experimented with landscapes from direct
observation. I recently did a series on breakfast. These were done from photos.
I do not go beyond what I see as I have always imagined paintings as I look at
the world. Now I am having fun creating some of these images. I live and work
in the Boston area (US) but also paint from my travels. I grew up in New
Orleans and it remains a favorite place. I would like to paint there.

Here is a sampling of the initial
works in the gallery. You can click on the images to enlarge them. 

Rita McGrath at Harvard Business Review has written a blog post on why she hates micropayments.  Micropayments are financial transactions involving very small sums of money (see Wikipedia). For online publishing, a small fee would allow you to view the content for a certain period of time or for a certain number of articles.

Personally, I’m not sold on the concept of micropayments for content which is probably why I was lured to Ms. McGrath’s article in the first place.

The idea has been around a long time — at least since the mid-to-late 90s — with both supporters and detractors weighing in. Millions have been lost by companies seeking to capitalize on streams of micropayments, almost all of which eventually crashed and burned. Myself, when confronted with a request to chip in 99 cents for a one-time glimpse at an article or $2.99 for a week’s worth (as some of my local newspapers are doing) — well, I close that window and go away.

The author of the article discusses further the importance for any payment system adopted to consider “how the payment link of customers’ consumption chains fits into their total experience”. Micropayment systems have a tall order in that they need to be seamless, transparent, and achieve inevitability. Even grimmer for publishers, it’s not only the micropayment experience that needs to be improved but also the non-micropayment systems too.

For the past few years, I’ve paid a yearly subscription to the Wall Street Journal for the print publication and the online subscription. With my yearly renewal coming up very soon, I’ve decided to discontinue my online subscription to the WSJ. Why would I do that? There are some very basic reasons to why I’m dropping WSJ.com. I rarely find myself reading the online content of the WSJ. I either already read the stories in the print version of the WSJ or I have found myself already familiar with the news story because I read a similar story posted elsewhere online. Stopping by the WSJ.com, unlike CNN or FoxNews, never became a daily ritual for me.

read more

I am interrupting the usual business oriented weekday posts to ask
you a favor.  Artsetter is a Paris based online art gallery. I like their approach as they take the risk out for
the buyer and the seller. When you purchase an art work, Artsetter holds the
money through a French bank. Then the artist ships to the buyer. Once the buyer
receives the art work, Art Setter releases the money to the artist taking what is a very
modest commission for the industry. They allow each artist to set up their own gallery. Art Setter is creating a community as each member can vote on others and create favorites. Any one can apply to join.

I am trying to set up an online gallery for my art on the site. I
have applied and now need 50 votes over the next 30 days. Can you vote for me?
You have to first register at their site but it is quick and there is nice art
by a number of artists. Here is the home page of the site.

My five paintings have been cropped by the site to fit a square format.
This is one They are all rectangles. However, once I set up my gallery I will
be able to display the full painting. You can see the complete images of five I
submitted below. You can click on any image to make it large.

Once you get to the site go to the candidates tab. Be patient it
takes a few moments for the first one to appear. I have been coming up first as
I was the last one when I last looked but someone may have come in after
me.  In the case I do not come up first, scroll through the others to find
my application.

There are quite a few excellent painters and photographers. I voted
for a number of them myself.  This
Is not a competition. You can vote for as many as you want.  Thanks for your consideration.  Let me know what you think. 

I recently came back from New Orleans where I attended the Webtrends Engage event and watched the city anticipate the Super Bowl. See this weekend for my reports on eating and live music in New Orleans. While there I spoke
again with Jascha Kaykas-Wolff.  We continued the topic I
started with Alex Yoder, their CEO (see yesterday's post). Jascha gave me some concrete examples of how
this openness is being put into practice.

Spirit Airlines
is a new Webtrends customer. They use the target capabilities in the Optimize
suite to provide individualized offers to customers. The Webtrends Visitor Data
Mart allows this to occur as it can take data from several sources to provide a
complete picture of customer activities. Webtrends can give a company both
aggregated customer data and data on specific individuals across all channels.

In the case of
Spirit Air, the company can look at a customer’s prior activity and provide
special fares and seating to reward their most active customers. This data
scanning through the Visitor Data Mart and the special offers through Optimize
happens on the fly because of the open architecture implemented by Webtrends.
The ability to combine these tools on the fly also provides a useful feedback
loop to conduct tests of offers and other Web site components.

Cabelas is
another client. It is a large retail sporting goods outfitter that uses
Webtrends Analytics 9. They can collect customer data online and bring it into
their enterprise data mining tools. Traditionally, Web data was not integrated
with offline data but the open architecture within Webtrends allows for this
combination. This allows for the combination of online and in-store
transactions so they can better reward customers in their frequent purchasing
program.

It goes beyond
this to allow Cabelas to better infer customer intensions and respond
appropriately. For example, a customer might start to buy some camping gear
online but back out. Then they might get some of the purchases at the store the
next day. Now Cabelas can make a special offer to them to complete the purchase
of related items for their upcoming camping trip.

If the population
within Facebook was a country it would be the fourth largest in the World. This
makes Facebook an emerging frontier for online marketing. It uses its own
technology that does not allow for Javascript so this makes data collection
more difficult. Webtrends is working to provide more access to Facebook data
for its customers.

With their data
collection APIs Webtrends has found a way to connect some portions of Facebook
data.  A brand can set up a Facebook
fan page and provide an application connected to this fan page. Using Webtrends
they can access all of the data connected with the Facebook application.

To promote this
Facebook related capability, Webtrends has launched a Great Data Giveaway Contest
for customer intelligence analysts. 
To enter, a person has to register on the Webtrends fan page, give
Webtrends some information about themselves and state what they would do with
the data. They also have to share this activity with their friends.  There has been a great response so far.
Webtrends will now be able to look at the data from the contest entries and
decide which ones to involve in sales activities.

Jascha said the
use of traditional standalone micro-sites that brands set up for their customers
and prospects have been hurt by Facebook. While you lose a lot of control over
data collection with Facebook it brings a ready-made audience. Now Webtrends is
working to provide further access to Facebook related data to support this
trend. This move is part of the larger Webtrends effort to extend the reach of
customer data collection beyond traditional online sources to both reach back
into more old school offline sources and the many new school social media
sources that keep emerging.

Last week I attended the Webtrends Engage 2010 event in New Orleans. See this weekend for my reports on eating and live music in New Orleans. I covered some of the sessions on this blog. While there I had a
chance to speak with their CEO, Alex
Yoder, on an individual basis.  We
went over some of the major directions for the company.  Alex started by saying their core
principle was openness.  They are
culturally open as a company. They provide direct access to everyone, including
himself.

As part of this directive of
openness they recently provided access to their knowledge base to the general
public. This included how-to-dos for their products, bugs, fixes and other
company information that had been behind a firewall and only previously
accessible to customers. Now it is available to anyone on the Webtrends site.

They are also sharing the
lessons that they have learned inside their company. Alex said that they deal
with many of the same issues that their clients face so they can learn from
each other. This sharing also helps to build a stronger sense of community with
their clients.

On the technology side they
partner with a number of providers to round out their capabilities. These
include Radian 6 on the front end and Teradata on the back end. Alex said that
things are moving too fast for one firm to say that they can do everything. It
is often better to partner than to build.

They are also open from a
technology perspective. They provide open APIs for both data extraction and
data collection, one of the few firms to do both. On the data extraction side they
allow for integration of their data into other tools within the enterprise.
This helps Web analytics to get out of silos and into executive dashboards for
greater visibility. Their data on customer activity can also go into CRM
systems to allow for more complete customer records. Their findings can also
trigger action-based emails to employees to promote proper responses.

On the data collection side
Webtrends can incorporate data where Javascript cannot go. They can look at
anything that is digital, such as the records of in-store transactions, to
provide a complete record of customer activity.  They can also work with certain mobile devices.

Looking in the future Alex
said that Webtrends will continue to further optimize customer interactions.
There is a lot of marketing money flowing from traditional media into social
media. Webtrends wants to expand its support in this growing space. Mobile
devices is another growth area where they are working to enhance their
offerings. As marketing people need to work across a broader array of channels,
Webtrends wants to provide for better campaign management and coordination
across all of these channels.

Alex brought up gaming
consoles as another device where there is both marketing and analytic
possibilities. He recently received a Playstation3 for Christmas. It has a
large hard drive and an Internet browser. He can do email and chat and play
games remotely with others. Communities are developing around these games and
these communities will be fruitful targets for related marketing activities.

Alex said that his gaming
console has also taken away the need for cable TV as he can get what he wants
online. I have many friends who have also dropped cable and use their laptop
for TV through services such as Hulu.  When people watch TV through an online device there is much
greater opportunity to collect data and interact with viewers than the
traditional TV set. Alex said that the gaming console will likely become a channel
for direct response ads in the near future. It already has some ads and related
product information.

The same injection of
intelligence is occurring as people switch to Kindles and other online readers
such as the new Apple iPad. When you drop a print newspaper on a front door you
have no way of tracking what people do with it. With online readers there is a
whole range of data collection opportunities.

Alex closed by saying that
Webtrends is defined by its relationships. These include customer
relationships, relationships with the broader community, and the relationships
that its customers establish with their customers. Having grown up in New
Orleans I added that people here really appreciate the help that comes through
bringing events like Engage to their city. Alex said that this event is also
part of their plan to better support communities.  They have moved a number of the Engage activities out of the
hotel and into the city. 

Last week I attended the Webtrends Engage 2010 event in New Orleans. See this weekend for my reports on eating and live music in New Orleans. I covered some of the sessions on this blog. While there I had a
chance to speak with their CEO, Alex
Yoder, on an individual basis.  We
went over some of the major directions for the company.  Alex started by saying their core
principle was openness.  They are
culturally open as a company. They provide direct access to everyone, including
himself.

As part of this directive of
openness they recently provided access to their knowledge base to the general
public. This included how-to-dos for their products, bugs, fixes and other
company information that had been behind a firewall and only previously
accessible to customers. Now it is available to anyone on the Webtrends site.

They are also sharing the
lessons that they have learned inside their company. Alex said that they deal
with many of the same issues that their clients face so they can learn from
each other. This sharing also helps to build a stronger sense of community with
their clients.

On the technology side they
partner with a number of providers to round out their capabilities. These
include Radian 6 on the front end and Teradata on the back end. Alex said that
things are moving too fast for one firm to say that they can do everything. It
is often better to partner than to build.

They are also open from a
technology perspective. They provide open APIs for both data extraction and
data collection, one of the few firms to do both. On the data extraction side they
allow for integration of their data into other tools within the enterprise.
This helps Web analytics to get out of silos and into executive dashboards for
greater visibility. Their data on customer activity can also go into CRM
systems to allow for more complete customer records. Their findings can also
trigger action-based emails to employees to promote proper responses.

On the data collection side
Webtrends can incorporate data where Javascript cannot go. They can look at
anything that is digital, such as the records of in-store transactions, to
provide a complete record of customer activity.  They can also work with certain mobile devices.

Looking in the future Alex
said that Webtrends will continue to further optimize customer interactions.
There is a lot of marketing money flowing from traditional media into social
media. Webtrends wants to expand its support in this growing space. Mobile
devices is another growth area where they are working to enhance their
offerings. As marketing people need to work across a broader array of channels,
Webtrends wants to provide for better campaign management and coordination
across all of these channels.

Alex brought up gaming
consoles as another device where there is both marketing and analytic
possibilities. He recently received a Playstation3 for Christmas. It has a
large hard drive and an Internet browser. He can do email and chat and play
games remotely with others. Communities are developing around these games and
these communities will be fruitful targets for related marketing activities.

Alex said that his gaming
console has also taken away the need for cable TV as he can get what he wants
online. I have many friends who have also dropped cable and use their laptop
for TV through services such as Hulu.  When people watch TV through an online device there is much
greater opportunity to collect data and interact with viewers than the
traditional TV set. Alex said that the gaming console will likely become a channel
for direct response ads in the near future. It already has some ads and related
product information.

The same injection of
intelligence is occurring as people switch to Kindles and other online readers
such as the new Apple iPad. When you drop a print newspaper on a front door you
have no way of tracking what people do with it. With online readers there is a
whole range of data collection opportunities.

Alex closed by saying that
Webtrends is defined by its relationships. These include customer
relationships, relationships with the broader community, and the relationships
that its customers establish with their customers. Having grown up in New
Orleans I added that people here really appreciate the help that comes through
bringing events like Engage to their city. Alex said that this event is also
part of their plan to better support communities.  They have moved a number of the Engage activities out of the
hotel and into the city. 

The Economist:  Online social networks are changing the way people communicate, work and play, and mostly for the better, says Martin Giles

Complete Story