emergencemarketing.com

I had the pleasure to meet JP Rangaswami in person last week, who I had invited to speak as a keynote speaker at the FASTForward ‘08 conference. He spoke of the three main forces that are causing a powershift towards the individuals within the enterprise.

The first one is that of youth versus expertise. In this day and age, expertise is no longer connected to age, and while that is causing a fair amount of friction between the geeks and the geezers, it is an inevitable force that is driving change.

The second one is the democratization of participation. No longer is participation elitist, no longer do you need to ask for permission - the amateur hour has arrived.

The last one is that FAST is the new GOOD. Releasing alpha software, having perennial betas is the new way of doing business.

While there is major resistance to all those forces, combined they will cause a massive transformation within the enterprise. Combined with the powershift which already took place between companies and their customers, they could very well alter the way we think of firms forever.

A new report jointly produced between Forrester Research and Heidrick & Struggles paints a bleak picture of the (d)evolved CMO (Chief Marketing Officer). You can download the report here, but only after agreeing to become a “lead.”

While two thirds of CMOs want to get a higher involvement with business strategy development and increased P&L responsibility, the reality is that far too many of them are in fact disconnected from where the real action is.

Some of the findings are mind-boggling:

• Only 45% of CMOs have responsibility for product, service or solution development. Only 37.5% are responsible for pricing.
• Only 27.5% are in charge of sales  training.
• Only 25% are responsible for in-store buying experiences.
• Only 12.5% are accountable for the activities associated with customer service and support.

How can you be the Chief Market Listener and not be in charge of what customers say after they buy your product? If you are the Chief Market Officer, how can you not be in charge of deciding what gets sold in the marketplace and how much it will cost the buyer to acquire it? And if you are the Chief Customer Officer, how can you not be in charge for the in-store customer experience? The sales training issue is either a cause or effect for the ongoing rift between most sales and marketing department…

But wait, it gets worse…here is some data about their top objectives:

• Only 27.5% have “increase customer life-cycle value” as one of their top objectives.
• “Innovate” is an objective for only 40% of the survey takers
• Only 27.5% have “increase customer retention” as an objective

And just when you thought you got the extend of the sorry state of CMOs, you find this:

• Only 12% consider “personal knowledge of your customers” as one of their top 5 competencies to their personal success.
• Only 17% consider technology savviness to be one of those top 5 skills

Thankfully (sarcasm intended), more than 65% see people management as one of those top skills. But wait a minute…isn’t it leadership characteristics that get you into the C-suite? Management skills are so Industrial Revolution/last century skills…

Other interesting tidbits from the report include:

• On a scale from 1-3, with 3 being the most important, CMOs found marketing measurement (2.55) to be way more important than customer community development ((1.89) and social computing/web 2.0 tools (1.73).  That goes hand-in-hand with the fact that 92% have advertising as one of their main responsibilities.
• There is room for new industry marketing organizations, conferences and publications. Those three resources come in dead last in a list of 16 resources that CMOs ranked most valuable to their professional career development.

 The recommendations from the authors to improve the situation?

• Spend more time on career development
• Seize the opportunity to lead the organization towards customer-centricity
• Build credibility through the marketing team and leadership contributions.

How about not accepting the CMO job if it does not mean you are really the Chief Market Officer, or the Chief Customer Listener, or the Chief Voice of the Customer Officer, or the Chief Customer Lifecycle Value Owner?

While most people haven’t really yet grasped the meaning and the potential impact of the web 2.0, some are already trying to define the Web 3.0, and along with that comes the usual litany of buzzwords - let go of control, more pervasive, more intelligent, always on, we are in control, etc. (Stephen Baker from Business Week talks about it here and here, Valeria Maltoni has a very eloquent post with a great discussion here, and then of course Phil Wainewright and John Hagel were already having this debate two years ago).

One of the things that most people forget is that we always overestimate the amount of change in the short term and underestimate the amount of change in the long term.

Let’s start by taking a look at the short term. The adoption of web 2.0 is not anywhere near a done deal - with very powerful barriers to adoption standing in the way of success. Many of those barriers were the same that the web 1.0 tools and even pre-web tools faced. In fact many of those barriers are the same as the ones described in the context of innovations as far fledged as agricultural innovations in third world countries by Everett Rogers in his seminal book on adoption of innovations - Diffusion of Innovations.

Most of those barriers are from people, culture and political nature - the hardest of all to overcome (I like how Valeria calls it the Human 1.0 ability). Web 2.0 tools and processes have the potential to change organizational structures and to overhaul existing hierarchies, causing people in charge to resist those tools and come up with smoke-screens to defeat them - think security and compliance. Web 2.0 tools are social and collaborative in nature and many organizations just do not have a collaborative or social culture. And because of the collaborative nature of the tools, even self-organized groups face the classic collaboration conundrums - the white screen syndrome (how do we get started and who in the group decides how we organize ourselves in this collaborative space), and the fact that the value of the tools goes down to zero for all team members even if only one of them decides not to adopt the tools.

So with that in mind, trying to extract what the web 3.0 will look like based on what is currently happening with the web 2.0 is an exercise in futility. In fact, many of the extrapolations have been part of the innovator’s toolbox or vocabulary for a long time. Are we not overestimating the amount of change in the short term?

On the flip side, the web 3.0 could come with new forms of organizational structures, new political realities, and a new workforce - one where a new class of artisans bring their own tools to “the” work at hand. Some thinkers have painted big picture futures, including many great sci-fi authors, but also some business thinkers and magazines like Kevin Kelly, or FAST Company, just to name a few.

So, aren’t most of us underestimating the amount of change in the long term?

It is interesting to read about the new Google OpenSocial API. Jeremiah Owyang had a great article on his blog about it last week - titled: Explaining OpenSocial to your Executives. The mainstream media jumped on the bandwagon trying to explain things.

But my favorite analysis comes from Don Dodge - 50M Facebook users don’t care about OpenSocial APIs. Sure, he comes to the discussion with a Microsoft bias - but who in their right mind thinks that non-geeks will abandon Facebook and flock to OpenSocial apps? Is OpenSocial likely to drive new traffic to MySpace? Would I want to be listed as a friend of someone I “friended” (amazing how things tend to become verbs) on LinkedIn who has a personal profile on MySpace?

[Tags: OpenSocial social media facebook don dodge marketing 2.0]

According to a new commentary released by the Pew Internet Project, It will be hard to close the broadband divide in the US (pdf here).

We now rank # 15 among countries worldwide in terms of broadband subscribers (19.6 subscribers per 100 inhabitants compared to 31.9 for Denmark and 29.1 for Korea).

Yesterday I was fortunate to be the host of a really enlightening conversation on adoption issues related to enterprise 2.0 projects with Andrew McAfee, Euan Semple, Jenny Ambrozek, Jerry Bowles, and Jim McGee (you can listen to a replay of the event here). We had another session on Monday - but since we had some technical difficulties during that session the audio needs editing. I will write about that one when the audio is available.

One of the questions that crossed my mind is whether enterprise 2.0 tools (web 2.0 tools deployed within an enterprise environment) have the same barriers to adoption as traditional collaboration tools. One of the main barriers to adoption with collaboration tools is to not be able to get everyone who is working on a project to use the tools. This can happen for a variety of reasons - i.e., “the blank screen” syndrome, which happens when people do not quite know how to use the tools or organize their work within those tools, and revert back to email, face-to-face and phone instead of working within the specialized collaborative environment, or for cultural/political reasons, when people do not like the way the project is organized and boycott the use of the collaborative tools. In all those instances the value of the collaboration environment goes down to zero for all the other team members who want to use it. If some part of the work or the project lives outside of the project collaboration environment, then that environment has no more value than a person’s inbox - it is not complete.

Enterprise 2.0 tools on the other hand are less project-centric and a little more individual-people-centric, meaning that even if I am the only one who is using tagging or blogging on a project, that still has value to me. I am not sure that holds true for wikis, which are true collaborative environments.

Note that we also set up a Ning social networking group for Enterprise 2.0 Ravers - feel free to join and engage in that conversation as well.

[Tags: enterprise 2.0 web 2.0 adoption ]

Are you in the process of deploying Enterprise 2.0 Tools or thinking of doing it? Who in your organization is involved? What do you anticipate the biggest barriers to adoption to be? How will you measure success? Which process will you start with?

If you are interested in participating in a project in which we collectively come to an answer for these and other questions, then take a few minutes to fill out the Enterprise 2.0 Market Readiness Survey. We will share all the results with everyone who’s interested.

And of course feel free to post it on your blog for your audiences to fill in and participate (just point them to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=937203810006).

I have been looking for a group “to-do” list for a long time, and never really found what I was looking for. Most to-do lists are for individual usage - which is not what I am looking for. And unless you are Google, I do not even get why people bother developing those apps as there are a ton of applications on people’s desktop that already have that service integrated - for free.

But as far as a simple group task list for truly distributed teams….there isn’t much available. I finally found a solution that looked promising….integrating/synchronizing with Google calendar, etc. - all for $15. So I bought it thinking that would solve my problem. Except that when I tried to invite one of my closest associates, it required that he too buy that same application. That was almost a week ago, and of course that has not happened yet.

How can people do that? Group applications already have plenty of barriers to adoption to overcome - so why a company would artificially add one extra barrier in the mix is a mystery to me. I bet you that most “potential” users of this app would use it with teams of 2-3 people. So if that is the case, charge the buyer of the app $30-50 instead of trying to get $15 from all the users. That way you may end up with some real users instead of frustrated buyers.

Elementary…my dear Watson…

[Tags: barrier to adoption group application]

According to a new survey, Wiki’s in the Enterprise seem to deliver real results and appear to be sustainable (via Headshift). All that being said, team collaboration adoption in general is still something that 40% of companies give up on as they run into too much resistance.

As part of a client project I ran across a set speeches that former Oracle COO Ray Lane has been making on the “inter” Personal Enterprise (you can find a slide deck used at a Sandhill conference here).

In his recorded keynote presentation, which can be found at IT conversations, Lane reminds us that eighty percent of the enterprise software industry profits currently go to just three companies, while seven thousand companies fight over the remainder. In order to succeed in this environment, he recommends that enterprise software vendors focus on ease of adoption, instantaneous value and a minimum IT footprint. He also says that “…vendors need to make it easy for users to get started and provide real value to the customer before she is required to pay. The user experience should be personalized and contextualized and the product should spread through the enterprise organically, via user recommendation, rather than by management edict.”

That is in fact how we built eRoom Technology to become a profitable $40M company in the early 2000’s. We provided easy ways for individuals and small teams to get started after which the solution would spread organically throughout the enterprise through user recommendations. By the time the CIO at KPMG decided to standardize on eRoom as their collaboration platform, there were already over 2,000 happy eRoom users in the company. We then tried to scale the ease of adoption process by releasing an ASP version of the product. While I still believe that was a good idea, that strategy was not widely successful as the ASP offering never fully got embraced by our “enterprise” sales force. The shift from big upfront payments and fat commission checks to a more predictable pay-as-you go scheme was just too much of a culture shock.

In a lot of ways, that is also what is happening with Enterprise 2.0 tools - the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies within the enterprise. But as Harvard Business Professor Andrew McAfee, who coined the Enterprise 2.0 term, predicts, most Enterprise 2.0 tools will remain confined to geek-heavy groups, companies or industries, or at best they may find spotty mainstream penetration.

Part of the reason here is that while the tools do spread organically, they still have a long way to go in terms of user friendliness, depth of features, and seamless integration. Without those aspects, non-geeky users and innovators will have a hard time finding value in the tools.

[Tags: web 2.0 enterprise 2.0 innovation technology adoption]