Making Email a Better File Cabinet

Yes, Facebook and Twitter are popular, but a recent study by Osterman Research found that email remains the most important channel for business communications. The same study found that 55% of business users say that over a quarter of the information they need for work is tucked away in email folders.

Clearly, we're all still using email, and we all still need ready access to the information that's buried somewhere in email. Search tools built into applications like Gmail, Thunderbird, and Outlook are a big help for tracking down messages that contain a specific search phrase or keyword. Nonetheless, there are a few guidelines that email senders can follow to make it easier for recipients to find the data they're looking for, even if the message arrived months or even years ago, whether or not recipients are using email application search engines.

1. Make the subject line factual and descriptive.
   For example, instead of "Chaa-ching!", write something more prosaic like "Sales Order from Liberty Capital." You can add "Chaa-ching" at the end of the line or in the body of the message, if you like, but keep the first part of the subject line—the part someone notices first when skimming down a long list of titles—purely descriptive.
2. Label like messages in like ways.
   If you're sending sales orders and you title every message containing a sales order with the formula, "Sales Order from . . . ", you'll make it easier for your recipients to lay their hands on the order they're looking for, no matter how cluttered their email inbox is. When I send clients review drafts of business plans, white papers, or other business documents, I always write, "PLEASE REVIEW:" followed by the draft number and the document title. My clients are busy people, and I hope this formulaic titling makes it a little easier for them to notice that a new document has arrived that needs their attention.
   
3. When the subject matter of an email thread has changed substantially, begin a new thread or change the title accordingly.
   At the time, it might have seemed natural for the discussion on the new office printer to somehow become a discussion of the a new network monitoring feature that product management is trying to cram into the next software release, but two months from now, when you're looking for the market data to back up product management, you might not think to look at messages whose title refers to the new HP printer on the second floor.
4. Tag a message high priority only if it really is high priority.If you label everything as high priority, then 1) after a week or two your recipients will roll their eyes and ignore your sense of urgency, and 2) when they need to find that truly urgent message you sent, they'll have a harder time.
   

Paying any attention at all to email subject lines might seem pedantic, but I think it behooves all of us to recognize that we're swamped with information that's chaotically organized, and that's little things can make a difference.

Microsoft did a study a year or two ago and found that business users spend roughly one day per week just looking for the information they in order to do their jobs. That's a colossal waste of time, isn't it? One day of your week, every week, just hunting for data? That's the equivalent of showing up for work every day between January 1 and mid-March simply to tidy your office. Wouldn't you rather be able to use that time getting things done?

Enterprise search tools and improved email applications obviously help with this problem. But a little discipline in email authoring can make a difference, as well.

File cabinet photo by mrmanc, licensed by Creative Commons, some rights reserved.

Can Joyent Create a PaaS Platform More Cost-effective than Amazon EC2?

At last week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, I had the opportunity to talk to James Duncan, Director of Platform Strategies at Joyent. Joyent is a cloud computing vendor in the IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) market. They sell virtualized servers called Joyent Acclerators, which customers use for running Web applications.

The idea behind IaaS is that customers can grow or shrink their infrastructure dynamically. Expecting a surge of business, or need to crunch vast amounts of data for a rush project? No problem. IaaS lets you instantly access as many servers as you need: 50, 500, even 5000 or more. Project over? Again, no problem. Shut down the servers at once. You've managed to meet your computing needs without buying, configuring, and managing racks of servers yourself.

In January, Joyent bought Reasonably Smart, a cloud computing start-up that James and his business partner Bryan Bogensberger had founded the previous summer. First on their own and now at Joyent, James and Bryan have been developing the Smart Platform, a PaaS solution that lets programmers develop server applications in JavaScript and then deploy these applications to the cloud using Git, an open source version-control system. Now branded as a Joyent solution, the Smart Platform is ready to go into a private Beta test.

I asked James why he chose JavaScript as the programming language for the new platform. Why choose a language famous for improving interactivity in a browser, instead of a language more commonly associated with server-side applications, such as Python or Perl or Java?

He pointed out that JavaScript was designed from the outset to deliver a lot of functionality in a secure, self-contained environment (known in programming as a "sandbox"). Secure autonomy is a great feature for applications and services running in a shared environment such as a data center, where virtual servers from several customers might be running on the same machine. He also pointed out that more money is going into training and documentation work on JavaScript than into other popular languages, such as Ruby, PHP, and Python. And, of course, JavaScript is a proven language, already popular with lots of programmers, who have been using it for years to develop sophisticated client-side Web applications. Now these programmers can apply their knowledge of JavaScript to the development of fast, efficient server applications that run in the cloud.

The Smart Platform offers a couple of other advantages that cloud computing users may find attractive.

First, the platform is open source. Joyent hopes that customers will like Joyent's PaaS services so much, they'll subscribe to Joyent and pay them to run the platform. But customers and even non-customers are free to move the entire stack in-house. Running the platform in house could be helpful for developing prototypes, running private clouds (shared, elastic services run entirely behind the firewall), or combining private and public clouds, as needed. Also, by making the platform open source, Joyent expects to ease customers' concerns about being locked in to a particular PaaS vendor. (Vendor lock-in has been much discussed lately in cloud computing circles.)

Another important advantage of the Smart Platform is that it's truly priced like a utility: customers pay only when an application is servicing requests. They pay nothing when is present on a virtual server, but inactive (that is, not processing data or interacting with other applications). This utility pricing model has the potential to make Joyent far more cost-effective than even Amazon's highly affordable Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) service.

James offered this example. Let's say you're hosting your Web site in the cloud for a month. On Amazon, you would pay for the Amazon Machine Image (the Amazon virtual server) for the entire month, even if the Web site gets only a few hits and actually active for a few seconds or minutes.

On the Joyent Smart Platform, in contrast, you would pay only for those few seconds or minutes of activity; you would pay nothing for all the time the server is hosted on the Smart Platform inactive. As a result, your bill should be a small fraction of what it would be from Amazon.

Pricing based on activity rather than deployment could make a big difference for customers whose hosted applications are active only sporadically. It could also be attractive for customers who have forgotten to decommission servers once a project is over and have then been surprised to receive a big bill from a cloud service provider.

If you're interested in participating Beta of the Joyent Smart Platform, visit www.reasonablysmart.com.

The Wit and Wisdom of Scott Cook

Intuit's mini-conference on "Startups and the Cloud," which I wrote about here, featured a lively Q&A session with Scott Cook, Intuit's founder and chairman of the executive committee. Scott—who impressed me as knowledgeable, personable, and down-to-earth—offered a couple of sage remarks I particularly liked.

"Familiarity is 90% of ease of use."

Scott talked about the pains Intuit went through, especially in the early days, to eliminate complexity from their products' user interfaces. Convincing novice computer users to adopt Quicken as their tool for managing household finances was quite a challenge, particularly back in the days when an unformatted floppy drive could flummox a new user. (Intuit's solution: never tell the user the floppy drive is unformatted. Format the drive automatically, and let the user get on with his or her work.)

On a quest for usability, Intuit bought the rights to the interface of another product that was already popular and easy to use. Intuit engineers copied that other product's interface, pixel-by-pixel, and built it into a new version of Quicken.

"Familiarity is 90% of ease-of-use." If an interface design is already familiar, users don't have to think about using it. They simply use it and get on with their work.

I think Scott's advice about familiarity is spot on. Don't try to be overly creative or clever with your UI. When it comes to UI design, simplicity and familiarity are the cardinal virtues.

Later in the Q&A session, Scott Cook said this:

"Behind every successful entrepreneur, you'll find a supportive spouse and a couple of very surprised in-laws."

That remark rang true, too, and made me chuckle.

What Cloud Computing Offers Startups, Part 2

In a previous post, I discussed the operational and financial benefits of cloud computing for start-ups. Today I'd like to discuss another benefit that's just as important, and that has far-reaching implications for the direction of IT development in the coming years.

Cloud computing makes it easier than ever for software companies to deliver innovative, business-critical services to Small and Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs).

Until recently, most software start-ups avoided the SMB market. Selling products and services to SMBs seemed daunting for several reasons:

• Limited Budgets: SMBs are well known for having spartan IT budgets. Beyond buying basic networking gear, Microsoft Office, and perhaps an accounting system, a small business may make hardly any IT investment at all. Even larger, mid-sized businesses tend to be conservative spenders, leery of risk and demanding a clear ROI from a new product—even though it's often difficult or impossible to demonstrate an ROI with a brand new product.
  
• Distribution Overhead: Reaching SMBs has traditionally required a channel (e.g., a distributor who served SMBs in a given area or industry) or, worse, many channels and lots of advertising. Channels require a lot of attention in the form of training and support, and they take a bit out of a start-up's profit margin.
  
• Deal Flow: To achieve sufficient revenue, a start-up would need to close tens or hundreds of small deals to equal the same amount of revenue possible from one or two large enterprise sales. With limited staff, attention, and marketing funds, most start-ups (with the hearty encouragement of their investors) have preferred to pursue opportunities in the enterprise market.
  

But in the past couple of years, cloud computing has knocked down all these barriers. In fact, cloud computing solutions often start with the premise that the customer has limited time and money for managing complex, but important IT operations. The cloud computing vendor rushes in as the SMB hero, managing everything behind the scenes, while offering the customer an easy-to-use, comforting Web interface.

Old Obstacle	Cloud Computing Solution
Limited Budget	Cloud computing solutions, such as SaaS applications or hosted storage, can be delivered cost effectively. There's no need for on-premises hardware and time-consuming installation and configuration services. Customers buy just what they need, when they need it. Delivery on popular platforms such as Force.com and QuickBase greatly reduces customer-acquisition costs, which normally the vendor would have to pass along to the customer.
Distribution Overhead	Cloud computing services are marketed, sold, and delivered over the Web. Customers can discover point solutions built on cloud platforms offered by vendors they already know and trust (e.g., Amazon, Intuit, Microsoft, Salesforce.com). There's no need for a large sales team and offices scattered around the country, nor is there a need to sign on and train large numbers of resellers. Sales and marketing take place online.
Deal Flow	Through promotion in established platform communities, as well as through viral marketing, blogging, and targeted marketing efforts, vendors can find tens and then hundreds or thousands of new customers. At a time when enterprises are cutting their IT budgets, reaching SMBs who are looking for cost-saving, operational improvements and strategic advantages offered through new capabilities, seems like an attractive idea.

Cloud computing has changed the nature of the typical start-up. Instead of a capital-intensive organization building "enterprise-class" solutions for large companies, today's start-up is more likely a small, nimble team, taking full advantage of the economies offered by platforms like EC2 and open source, and delivering online services that are valuable to companies of all sizes—even another five-person company down the hall.


Photo of man and clouds by donabelandewen, Creative Commons License, some rights reserved.

What Cloud Computing Offers Startups

At the Intuit's mini-conference on "Startups and the Cloud," the discussions, which varied from investment to technology, repeatedly raised the question of what advantages, if any, cloud computing offered startups.

To answer that question, we need to know what cloud computing is. I'm going to borrow the definition developed by NIST, which Longworth Venture Partners analyst Vishy Venugopalan cited in his overview of cloud computing, which kicked off the day's events:

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, storage, servers, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

Five or ten years ago, it was not uncommon for a newly-funded start-up to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on infrastructure. Servers, disk arrays, back-up power supplies, management and monitoring software, an air-conditioned room with a raised floor—the list of capital expenditures could be impressive, and this investment needed to be made before engineers could begin any significant work developing products.

Cloud computing changes all that: it minimizes infrastructure investments, so that companies only need to invest in IT services when they're needed.

Cloud computing eliminates the need for that air-conditioned room filled with expensive server racks. It eliminates the need for the local IT manager to watch over them. And it shortens the management team's list of headaches, by sparing them the details of back-up tapes and server upgrades. IT can be provisioned cheaply and immediately—today, this afternoon, now, and development can begin right away.

Todd Hixon from New Atlantic Ventures put it this way:

Cloud computing gives you a sandbox for delivering solutions while assessing demand. It enables you to avoid needless investment in infrastructure.

Jeffrey Beir from North Bridge Venture Partners agreed:

Cloud computing allows developers to focus on the IP (intellectual property) that's unique to them.

After all, it's that unique IP that's ultimately going to make or break the company. It's the unique IP—not a rack of Dell servers in a computer room—that's going to be the quintessence of the start-up's brand, differentiating the company from the hundreds of other start-ups and thousands of larger companies already crowding the market.

By minimizing infrastructure costs and infrastructure management costs, cloud computing enables young companies to spend its precious capital on what's most essential. For young companies in this time of tight budgets and hard decisions, cloud computing is a financial and operational boon.

The Six Traits of a Fundable Entrepreneur

Yesterday afternoon in Waltham, Massachusetts, Intuit hosted on a mini-conference about the opportunities that cloud-computing offers start-ups. "Startups and the Cloud" proved to be an engaging event, packing a small auditorium on the campus of Bentley College. Sessions ranged from Longworth Venture Partners' Vishy Venugopalan's overview of the cloud computing marketplace to an open Q&A with Intuit founder Scott Cook to panel discussions with venture capitalists and CEOs about cloud computing and the changing economic environment for young companies.

The venture capitalist panel featured a seasoned team of investors:

• Jeff Bussgang from Flybridge Venture Partners
  
• Jeffrey Beir from North Bridge Venture Partners
  
• Todd Hixon from New Atlantic Ventures
  
• Shawn Broderick from
  TechStars
  

This group offered much wit and wisdom on a variety of topics. For now, I'll simply offer their composite profile of a fundable entrepreneur.

In response to a question from the audience, the panel offered this list of traits that they look for in an entrepreneur:

• Passion
  
• Domain expertise (the entrepreneur knows his or her area thoroughly, and isn't just coming up with an idea in response to a news story, for example)
  
• Unfair advantage (something that gives this team of entrepreneurs a sustainable head-start in the market)
  
• Street smarts (knowing how to get things done in difficult situations)
  
• A whip-smart mind
  
• Salesmanship
  

And Shawn Broderick offered this observation, which deserves to be mounted on a plaque over every entrepreneur's desk:

"Execution is insanely important."

Good CEOs May Lack Empathy, But Their Companies Depend on It

In a recent column, New York Times columnist David Brooks summarized recent research that found that successful CEOs were usually not empathetic, novel-reading, team-oriented people. On the contrary. The research—conducted by Steven Kaplan, Mark Klebanov and Morten Sorensen and published in a report called "Which C.E.O. Characteristics and Abilities Matter?"—found that people skills were overrated for CEOs.

"They found that strong people skills correlate loosely or not at all with being a good C.E.O. Traits like being a good listener, a good team builder, an enthusiastic colleague, a great communicator do not seem to be very important when it comes to leading successful companies.

What mattered, it turned out, were execution and organizational skills. The traits that correlated most powerfully with success were attention to detail, persistence, efficiency, analytic thoroughness and the ability to work long hours."

So, can we throw empathy out the window? Not at all.

Empathy is vital to any company's success. Empathy underlies every successful customer interaction, even if it doesn't play an obvious role in some high-level decision making. Ignore the customer requirements in product design, or continually snub customers on the phone, and a company will find itself in trouble, even if it has a remarkably efficient, highly analytical CEO.

Take the case of Apple. Apple products are so attractive and easy to use, people flock to stores to buy them as soon as they become available. In surveys, Apple's customer service consistently beats out that of rival PC makers. And Apple's commitment to empathy is perhaps nowhere better expressed than in the Genius Bar, a walk-up help desk you'll find in every Apple store. At the Genius Bar, helpful Apple employees will listen to you describe your problems with an Apple product and try to resolve them—for free, unless the product requires a physical repair.

Apple is truly an empathic company. Empathy—expressed through great product design and great customer service—is an essential element of its success.

Yet Apple's CEO is, shall we say, not always known for his calm, patient, empathic demeanor. This hasn't slowed Apple one bit. Steve Jobs has always been passionate about building insanely great products for customers and serving customers well (even if the company has made a few misjudgments in this area over the years). He clearly values empathy, even if he doesn't always embody it himself. He pushes the people around him to serve their customers well—and they do.

So while it's true that organizations often take on the character qualities of their leaders, it's also true that a CEO with a cut-and-dried, even brutal leadership style can build and lead a successful, highly empathic organization.

Empathy photo by Pierre Phaneuf, Creative Commons License, some rights reserved.Apple Genius Bar photo by maebmij, Creative Commons License, some rights reserved.

Content Is Still King in IT Marketing

Another finding of the TechTarget/Google research I mentioned in yesterday's post, was that content is still king when it comes to marketing and selling SMB and enterprise IT solutions.

White papers, email newsletters, and case studies still play important roles in helping customers understand technology and best practices, and in helping customers with choose one product over another.

Customers look for different types of content in different stages of the purchasing process.

White papers are important in the awareness and consideration phases of purchasing. They're much less important in the final decision-making stage. By then, customers are interested in product comparisons, case studies, and, above all, trial software.

The table below describes how customers use various types of content. (For an explanation of these phases, see yesterday's post.)

Content Type	Purchasing Phase
Postings in online communities	Awareness Consideration
Email newsletters	Awareness Consideration
White Papers	Awareness Consideration
Case Studies	Awareness Consideration Final Decision
Product Literature (e.g., Data Sheets)	Consideration Final Decision
Online Vendor Demos	Consideration Final Decision

One conclusion from this study: Social media, however popular, doesn't eliminate the need for traditional marketing, when it comes to selling sophisticated IT products or products in highly competitive markets.

Google/TechTarget Research Ties Keyword Search Terms to IT Purchasing Cycles

One of the more interesting insights presented by TechTarget at this week's ROI Summit in Newton, MA, was this:

IT purchasers change their search terms as they move through a multi-month purchasing process.

TechTarget reached this conclusion after undertaking an extensive study with Google of 2,200 professionals who play decision-making roles in IT purchases.

Phase I: Awareness
TechTarget and Google found that IT purchasers begin by searching for information about an issue or problem (e.g., data leak protection or VoIP quality).

Searches might include keywords such as "risk," "troubleshoot," and "optimize."

Phase II: Consideration
Once IT purchasers are familiar with the nature of the problem and the types of products available to address it, they begin searching for information about specific products and solutions.

Keywords might include the word "solution," as well as specific brand names.

Phase III: Decision
Finally, as they focus on a few key vendors in preparation for making their final purchase decision, they search for information comparing one product to another. They no longer search for general information about the problem; they understand the problem well and want detailed information about product capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses.

Searches will likely include product names and the word "comparison."


The Changing Prevalence of Search Keywords in IT Purchasing Cycles

The chart below shows how keyword searches evolve across the three phases of the purchasing cycle: Awareness (of a problem), Consideration (of various approaches to solving the problem), and Decision (as to which product to choose).



Conclusion for marketers: Make sure you have content and search keywords that address each phase of the buying cycle.

Benchmark Your Social Media Responsiveness

I wrote recently about social media metrics and quoted Forrester's Jeremiah Owyang talking about how difficult it is to measure the value of social media communications.

In some areas, such as tweeting and blogging, numbers are essential, because frequency is important. In other areas, such as video, frequency may actually dull results. (See this Technology Review story about an HP study that found an inverse correlation between the frequency of videos posted on YouTube and the videos' popularity. If you post lots of videos, the popularity of your videos tends to decline.)

In addition to measuring hits, tweets, and posts, it's important to benchmark your organization's responsiveness to social media communications. If you're at a dinner party, it would be rude to sit silently for 5 minutes before responding to a comment or question that was addressed to you. Similarly, online, it's rude—or at least a missed opportunity—if you wait too long to respond to a tweet or blog post, especially if it's from a customer.

How to Benchmark Your Social Media Responsiveness

1. Pick 3-5 important social media events from the past week. These could be tweets, blog posts, or blog comments. They could occur on your media properties or someone else's. They could even be press releases or announcements of importance to your business, but not originating in a social media tool at all.
   
2. Check the time of the event and the time of your organization's first response.
   
3. Examine how the conversation developed. Did it broaden, involving multiple departments? Did the right people respond in the right way? Were the right people notified in time? Which tools did people use? Did a tweet lead to a tweet, then to a blog post? Did the conversation end up involving legal or PR?
   
4. If you uncovered any breakdowns in communication, or learned any lessons about the importance of promptness, review them with your team, and try better this week. You might need to fine-tune email aliases, ensure that blog readers are updated with the right RSS feeds, establish corporate policies regarding the content of social media communications (e.g., respectful, nothing off-color), and so on.
   
5. Repeat this exercise in a week or two, and see how you're doing. Did any past problems reappear? Did you notice any patterns?
   

By benchmarking your responsiveness, you can ensure that your organization is ready to respond as promptly and effectively as possible to important communications from customers, partners, the press, and the online community at large.

Stopwatch photo by wwarby, some rights reserved.

Tired of Jumping from One Google Tool to Another to Manage a Campaign? Try Google AgencyToolkit

At a SEMPO meeting last night in Cambridge, I got a chance to see a new Web site that Google has put together to make it easier for marketers to find all the tools available for running a highly effective Google AdWords campaign.

Now, instead of jumping from the AdWords Editor to Hot Trends (to see whether certain key phrases are becoming more popular or less) to Google Optimizer (for checking the results of your latest A/B tests of Web site content), you can start from a simple, clean page that presents all these Google tools in one neat, orderly place.

The new destination is Google AgencyToolkit. The site groups tools into four categories:

Plan
AdPlanner, Insights for Search, Blog Search, Hot Trends, Traffic Estimator

Place
Placement Tool, Ad Preview Tool, Site and Category Exclusion Tool

Create
Search-based Keyword Tool, Campaign Optimizer, AdWords Editor, AdWords API

Measure
YouTube Insight, Analytics, Conversion Optimizer, Conversion Tracking, Website Optimizer, Webmaster Tools

(If you roll over the links above, you'll see just how widely scattered these tools are across Google's properties.)

The site looks like this:



If you're running an AdWords campaign or if you'd just like the convenience of having all these in one location, give the site a visit.

How to Measure the Results of Social Media Marketing

In some ways, marketing has changed a great deal in the past few years: there are fewer big tradeshows, there's a lot less paper collateral, no more middle-of-the-night press checks, more time spent online, more time spent tweeting and Webcasting and podcasting, and a great deal of focus on SEO and SEM.

Yet the mission of marketing hasn't changed. It's still the function that represents customer needs and wants to the rest of the business, directing the development and delivery of products and services. And it's still the function that introduces, explains, and promotes the product and services the business has created. Marketing is just doing that work with a lot more @ signs these days.

But does social media marketing, which relies of Facebook rather than direct mail and Twitter instead of phone banks, deprive marketing of the instrumentation it has come to rely on? Consider:

1. Over the past decade, marketing has become increasingly instrumented, and marketing professionals have been measured (and sometimes compensated) according to their results.
   Online advertising, which allowed click-throughs to be measured, facilitating A/B testing and brutally frank assessments of a campaign's ROI, contributed to this Taylorization of marketing. So, too, did CRM systems, campaign management systems, marketing automation systems, and a variety of other management tools. The goal of this instrumentation to eliminate the vague connection between effort and reward that seemed inherent to marketing, especially in advertising. That vagueness was neatly captured by John Wanamaker's quip: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." Web 1.0 and 2.0 marketing automation promised to clear up the mystery.
   
   
2. As a result of both consumers and businesses working and playing increasingly online, businesses have reduced marketing investments in print and in live events, while increasing marketing investments in e-commerce, online promotions (e.g., email marketing and Web seminars), and other Web-centric activities.
   No doubt that many of the decisions supporting this change were supported by the glaring metrics made available by sales force and marketing automation systems mentioned above.
   
   
3. In the past year, social media marketing has emerged as the hottest area in marketing.
   Companies are trimming and sometimes slashing investments in other areas of marketing and focusing on social media activities: tweeting, blogging, interacting with customers on Facebook, etc. For example, I know a mobile services company that has trimmed marketing to two people: a product manager and a social media manager. I suspect that there are many reasons for companies making this switch. Customers are increasingly familiar with these tools from their recreational time outside work. Most of the tools are free, so companies investing in them largely are only paying for their marketing staff's labor. And the use of the tools must be effective. Customers success stories about Comcast and Zappos on Twitter, for example, demonstrate the viability of social media marketing.
   
   
4. Measuring social media activity itself offers little information about the value of social media activity.
   Are 60 tweets better than 30? It depends on how the tweeter's audience responds to the tweets. Ten thoughtful, empathic, and helpful tweets will likely be received more positively than twenty hype-laden tweets. Mere numbers alone can't convey the effectiveness of social media, because social media rely on human values such as tone and empathy that resist numerical characterization. This is an important point that Forrester analyst Jeremy Owyang made during a panel discussion on April 1 at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Here's a summary of his remarks on this topic from Susan Etlinger of the Horn Group:
   

   
   Jeremiah says that most marketers are measuring social media incorrectly; they're focusing on the measurements of yesteryear. There is no access to server logs on Facebook and other tools/networks, so you have incomplete data. And even if you had that data, it wouldn't tell you what is happening: there just aren't good enough automated methods to measure changes in tone. (As someone who does this regularly, I can attest to this: quality analysis doesn't scale that well.) A lot of companies are trying to tackle this problem.
   

   
   


5. Is it true then that marketing, which has become increasingly quantified and Taylorized, can't apply metrics to its hot new practice, social media? Well, yes and no.
   No, because, as Jeremy points out, measuring the frequency of tweets is largely meaningless, and measuring Facebook activity is difficult and in some cases impossible. (True, you can measure some Facebook activity, such as the number of fans who have signed up on a company's profile page, but most activity will be difficult to quantify.)
   
   However, outside of social applications themselves, marketing teams can certainly measure key performance indicators such as:
   
   
   
   • customer satisfaction (through surveys)
     
   • inbound leads to landing pages referenced in tweets and on Facebook
     
   • length of sales cycle
     
   • mean-time-to-resolution on trouble tickets
     
   • sales overall
     
   
   Think of social media activity as a conversation. If you have lots of good conversations with lots of customers, you would expect that your customers' overall opinion of your company would improve and that your new sales and maintenance renewals would increase—so measure those things.
   
   The companies that have cut back on data sheets and trade shows and invested in Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook are doing so not because they love being tactful and responsive 24 hours a day, but because they think it's the best way of serving their customers and growing their business. Recession notwithstanding, if a company treats its customers well, serving them through any channel of communication, then it should see positive results on the bottom line. And those traditional bottom-line results are probably the best metrics for judging the success of social media marketing.
   

I'm launching a social media project for a new client, and that's how we'll be measuring the project's success: by the numbers of inbound leads and units sold. The marketing technology might be new, but the nature of a business's bottom line hasn't changed at all.

If you have other ways of measuring social media marketing success, please share them in a comment!

Photo of a weighing scale by pareeerica, some rights reserved.

Companies That Drift Off Course Often Begin by Facing the Wrong Direction

I have a friend who's a senior network engineer. He spent many years as the top network troubleshooter for a major U.S. bank.

Yesterday he and I were discussing the NetFlow analysis features of a particular network management product. (NetFlow is a protocol for measuring network activity—top applications in use, amount of traffic flowing through a router, etc.) He was disappointed that this particular product's NetFlow capabilities were so minimal. Other NetFlow analysis products could access the same raw data and present more more useful analysis to network engineers.

The problem, he said, is that the engineering manager who built the product didn't believe that you had to know a lot about the market or technology you were working with; instead, you simply had to be smart.

My friend and I agreed: It's always a mistake to base your products and services merely on what you know, instead of what customers need. The customer should always be your primary focus. And if you need to understand customer needs in a mature market like the network management market, you'd better learn a lot about network management fast, if you're going to start building products.

So don't ask, "What can I build with what I know?"

Instead ask, "What does the customer need, and how can I build it?" If you need to learn something new along the way or hire industry experts in order to build that new thing, so be it.

Otherwise, you'll end up making a half-hearted attempt, come up with a half-baked product, and reap so-so results.

Lesson: To avoid drifting off course, pay attention to the direction you're facing when you start. Don't face inward, toward your own team. Face outward toward the customer. And stay focused there. Your steadfastness will pay off.

Token Ring Network Manifesto Attracts Little Interest from IT Industry

April Fool's Day Archive:

A recently leaked manifesto proclaiming to set forth "self-evident, immutable" principles for Token Ring Networks has elicited scant interest from IT industry press and analysts. The six-page document, watermarked with what appears to be the remnants of a frothy coffee drink, points out that networks have become essential for business, that businesses ought to be able to count on cables that are firmly attached to sockets, and network drivers really ought to be kept up to date.

Unlike the bolder, declamatory manifestos of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which called for the casting off of chains and the purification of society, this manifesto strikes a conciliatory tone, offering to "begin a conversation, not define it."

A copy of the manifesto was recently found lying on a table at the Church Street Starbucks in Cambridge, MA. Whether the document had been left there as part of a guerilla marketing campaign or simply out of a lack of interest on the part of a bored reader, was impossible to say.

Starbucks photo by dichohecho, some rights reserved.

Flying Blind with Regard to Application Performance

By now, these trends are pretty obvious:

• Organizations are becoming increasingly distributed, spanning remote offices, strategic partners, outsourced workforces, and ad hoc teams in order to take advantage of the most talent for the lowest expense
  
• Organizations are cutting headcount and trimming operational budgets, making employee productivity more important than ever before
  
• Networked applications are involved in nearly every aspect of business operations, including product design, production, sales, marketing, accounting, logistics, and customer service
  

It would seem prudent, then, for organizations to monitor the performance of their applications, since networked applications are 1) the tools most workers are using, and 2) at risk of reducing worker productivity through performance problems and application outages.

But many organizations don't systematically monitor application performance at all. This jarring revelation appears in a study about cloud computing just published by InformationWeek.

The study noted that 40% of respondents didn't have a system in place to monitor internal applications, let alone cloud applications. An integrator interviewed in the study remarked that fewer than 30% of his customers had application monitoring systems in place; in other words, more than 70% didn't monitor applications.

Given the rising popularity of video and voice applications, which require high-performance, low-latency network connections, and the rising popularity of cloud computing—in use or about to be in use at 27% of the organizations surveyed—the lack of application monitoring seems like trouble in the offing.

The InformationWeek article offers a number of helpful suggestions, including the use of WAN optimization for accelerating applications serving remote offices. Application performance monitoring solutions from companies such as Blue Coat, Fluke Networks, NetScout, and WildPackets can also be helpful. A new standard called Apdex, which attempts to measure the quality of service an application delivers, is gaining a following and also worth a look.

Disclosure: Blue Coat is a client.

SaaS Credibility Survey

As you probably know, many businesses are wary of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications because of concerns about security, reliability, and vendor lock-in.

In addition to building the absolutely best IT infrastructure possible, what can SaaS vendors do to assuage end user fears?

Take this short survey (2-3 minutes) and let your voice be heard.

Two Strategies for Putting Enterprise Social Media within Everyone's Reach

When Jive Software recently announced its new SBS platform, Dennis Howlett at ZDNet raised the issue of user adoption: in many organizations, it's difficult to get users to contribute content to social media platforms. Usage patterns typically follow a 1/9/90 rule. About 1% of users contribute heavily. Another 9% contribute periodically, while 90% of users lurk, reading content, perhaps, but not contributing any content of substance.

How can social media platform vendors overcome the 1/9/90 habits of the crowd?

One approach, which most vendors are taking, is to make the platform interface richly featured and easy to use. These vendors hope that rich features will spur the creation of rich content, which in turn will make enterprise 2.0 dashboard indispensible—that is, the dashboard will become one of the few windows users always keep open on their desktops. These vendors are taking other steps, too, such as offering consulting services to train users and inculcate useful social-media habits.

Another approach, complementary to the first, is to use widgets to embed social media platform interfaces in Web applications, such as Gmail, that are popular with users. Social media start-up Socialcast is following this route.

This second approach makes sense. Certainly it can't hurt to put access to the platform . If my Socialcast interface is right there in Gmail, I'm more likely to post something to it, perhaps in response to something I've just read or sent in email. I don't have to switch windows. The gadget lowers the amount of work, including context-switching, I have to do in order to use the software.

Socialcast has widgets for a few major applications available now. Many more coming soon in their next release. I look forward to seeing what they come up with and how their user community responds.

Monastic Ireland Provides Cloud Storage for Western Intellectual Capital during Cultural Blackout

During a cultural outage, now known as the Dark Ages, monks in Ireland copied important works by Aristotle, Galen, and others, creating essential back-up copies, which were later downloaded back to the Continent and used as intellectual capital to launch the Renaissance.

That's one story (recounted with different terminology in Thomas Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization) of Ireland's contribution to the world at large.

There are many others, and of course, there's an ever-growing, superb canon of writing, and wonderful music.

It's a shame, then, that here in the U.S., for children especially, St. Patrick's Day means so much time wasted on anything having to do with leprechauns.

I don't mind people talking so much about leprechauns on St. Patrick's Day, as long as, when the time comes to talk about German culture, they lead off with a discussion of poltergeists. Or when it comes to talking about England, they start with duergars, rather than Shakespeare. Or when surveying New York culture in the 20th century, they skip over the architecture, Abstract Expressionism, the poets at the Tavern, jazz, and the Met, and focus instead on the fortune tellers at Coney Island.

Have I made myself clear?

Good. Let's all have a round of Smithwick's and continue.

Irish culture. Today, we celebrate it. Wear green, pick up a good book by a fine author like John McGahern or Anne Enright, and listen to some fine music, like Martin Hayes below.

And if you've got kids, skip the leprechaun nonsense and pick up The Island of Horses, which I'm reading now to our 7-year-old, and which is a fine tale.











Erin Go Bragh!

Irish pub photo by nicksarebi, some rights reserved

How Good Is The Interface to Your Web Site or SaaS Application? Find Out Now

I've written before about the importance of customer experiences. When I look back on the companies I've worked with over a couple of decades in high tech, the quality of experience a product provided largely determined the success or failure of the product overall.

In the software market, user interfaces obviously play a major role in a customer's experience and, hence, in a product's success or failure. Complex, cumbersome interfaces confused users, prolonged sales cycles, and often limited buyers to sophisticated engineers working in solitary roles. Streamlined, easy-to-use interfaces, often developed in concert with customers, led to faster sales, more efficient operations, and greater business success overall.

There's a wealth of material available on the importance of user interfaces and customer-driven design. Jakob Nielsen, Jared Spool, and Steve Blank all have important things to say on these topics.

Of course, if you're in the middle of a product launch, or you're a product manager working to an aggressive schedule, or you're a programmer sweating to make your deadlines, you probably don't have a lot of time on your hands to do in-depth reading and learn a new set of best practices.

Nonetheless, you'd probably like to make sure the Web site or software you're building meets the needs of your customers to the greatest degree possible, since this is the most direct and cost-effective way to:

• ensure rapid adoption by customers
  
• shorten sales cycles
  
• reduce customer support calls
  

So, busy with development and probably short on time and money, how can you ensure you've got the best user interface possible? How can you nip a problem in the bud now, before it turns into a full-fledged customer support nightmare later?

Introducing Mad*Pow

You can take advantage of a new service I'm now offering with my new business partner, Mad*Pow.

I didn't want to merely write about improving customer experiences, wringing my hands without offering a concrete solution. Instead, I wanted to be able to help any interested companies address this problem quickly and directly. So I met with usability designers, explained what I was looking for, and ended up forming a partnership with Mad*Pow, a leading experience design agency.

They're great folks. They're based in Portsmouth, NH, and their clients include:

• Aetna
  
• American Express
  
• ESPN
  
• Google
  
• Intuit
  
• Journal of New England Medicine
  
• NBC Universal
  
• Starwood
  

You can check out some of their projects here.

Incidentally, Mass High Tech just named Amy Cueva, Mad*Pow's Founder and Chief Experience Officer one of its "Women to Watch" award winners.

The company was founded in 2000, and, as you can see from the client list above and from their Web site, they've clearly grown into a dynamic, successful company. I'm thrilled to be working with them to address the user experience problem.

Rapid Strategic Analysis of User Experiences

So what does our new service entail?

First, we’ll interview you to understand your business objectives and design goals. Then we’ll conduct a thorough assessment of your Web site or Web application. Our analysis will include:

• Heuristic analysis by multiple testers and designers to uncover usability weaknesses.
  
• Competitive analysis (2-3 competitive or comparative sites)
  
• Marketing and messaging analysis
  

We will then deliver an annotated slide deck and a written report detailing our findings, including:

• Analysis of content, navigation, design, brand, and messaging
  
• Vision for the future—suggestions for improvements in all areas analyzed
  
• SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis summary of the user experience overall
  

Our report will answer these vital questions:

• Is your Web site or Web application’s user interface as easy to use as possible? Are any design elements confusing or cumbersome? How well does the interface serve its users?
  
• How well does the interface serve your various audiences?
  
• Does the interface support customers making full use of your offerings? Does it facilitate upgrades and cross-selling?
  
• How does the interface compare to those of your competitors?
  

In addition, you can ask Mad*Pow's design team to offer various design alternatives for your site or application.

We've designed this process to achieve quick turnaround: we expect to work from kick-off interview to delivered report in 5 business days. And we've priced it in fitting with the budgets that are prevailing in today's, um, wonderful economy.

You can read more about the service here. (PDF)

If you're interested in having our team kick the tires on what you're building, please contact us at experience @ bennettstrategy dot com.


Lightbulb photo by rpongsaj, some rights reserved.

Data Security for SaaS, PaaS, and Social Media

One of the most common objections to cloud computing is that cloud computing poses too great a risk for data security. Internal data that is being stored safely in an internal data center may be subject to interception in transit to or from a remote application. It might also be vulnerable when stored in the cloud itself.

Cloud vendors such as Amazon, Google, and Salesforce are going out of their way to demonstrate tight security controls to major clients. Nonetheless, a lot of CIOs, CSOs, and others have their doubts.

It's worth pointing out that, whether they realize it or not, most enterprises are leaking—nay, hemorrhaging—data to the public Internet. As I wrote nearly a year ago, summarizing some fine reporting in InformationWeek, P2P applications alone are responsible for massive data leaks even at large, public companies.

When InformationWeek reporters investigated P2P networks to find out just how much confidential data was being accidentally leaked by P2P networks, they were shocked at what they found. Users were inadvertently publishing "spreadsheets, billing data, health records, RFPs, internal audits, product specs, and meeting notes . . . files with the home and cell phone numbers of senators, confidential meeting notes, and fund-raising plans [for a state political party] . . . spreadsheets listing patients' names along with their HIV and hepatitis status . . . [and] a slew of court documents regarding a sticky divorce."

Fortunately, there's technology available to detect and thwart such leaks. Data leak protection (DLP) products, often available as network appliances, can scan data leaving the network and raise an alarm about confidential data leaking out. A lot of companies have jumped into this market; a few years ago, no less than 46 different start-ups were tackling this problem. A few companies have emerged as leaders. You can learn more about DLP at this informational site: www.dlpindepth.org.

Certainly it makes sense for any medium or large enterprise to have a DLP solution in place. Once it's in place, it should provide effective monitoring and control over data posted to the cloud.

DLP doesn't address the problem of security vulnerabilities in cloud storage, but it does address vulnerabilities in cloud communications, and it also enables enterprises to ensure they know what data is being posted to the cloud in the first place, regardless of whether the destination is Salesforce.com, AWS, Facebook, or some other app.

What Is Blogging? What Is Pay-for-Post? A Socratic Dialog at Tweeto's Villa

Archeologists working on a dig (actually, a kitchen remodel) at a Greek restaurant on El Camino in Palo Alto recently unearthed this long-lost dialog that fills out Socratic canon and touches on the recent hoopla (no, that's not a kind of Thracian soldier) about pay-for-post blogging.

The scene. The courtyard of Tweeto's villa in the Los Altos hills.








Persons of the Dialog

Socrates

Tweeto, a wealthy landowner and venture capitalist

Flakoles, a partner in a PR firm

Glaucon, a junior employee of Flakoles

Hackaun, a programmer

Interns

SOCRATES. Greetings, friends. I am surprised to discover you outside now, for though the day is fair, and the sun graces us with her warmth, yet I know by habit you prefer to linger indoors, hunched over your Macs.

FLAKOLES. The Internet's down.

SOCRATES. That explains your glum aspect. Entering now, I wasn't sure if I was beholding my dear friends or a motley of actors in some final, dreadful scene by one of our tragedians. Do none of you get good 3G reception?

FLAKOLES. Yon fair hills, whose tawny grassy ripples like the flank of an anxious stallion stamping before a race, do block all our coverage as surely as a stone wall.

SOCRATES. Ah, Flakoles, I know you make your living in PR, but your remarks show you to have been an English major. So none of you have network access. But where is Flippanes?

HACKAUN. Flippanes is the sole exception. He had the good sense to sell all his CountryWide stock in 2005, so he's sitting in his Porsche, dialed up over his satellite phone.

SOCRATES. Flippanes is a man who is, if not wise, at least shrewd. But come, Glaucon, why do you, more than the others, blubber so? Surely a few minutes or even a few hours without network access could not reduce a man to such a disconsolate state? Your cheeks are red, and I can that you have rent your toga in one or two places, which, I might add, has not improved the lines of the garment. As well, I can see that your chest has not been out in the sun in many months.

FLAKOLES. Be gentle with our friend Glaucon, Socrates. He has had a miserable week. He spent Monday pitching pay-for-post blogging to all his accounts, and now they either shun him entirely or send him nasty emails whose language would even make great Bacchus blush.

SOCRATES. It would seem, Glaucon, that you have misunderstood the nature of blogging, or perhaps we should say that you and the community have differing conceptions of blogging. Perhaps it would be worthwhile, as long as we are sitting here waiting for—which ISP?

TWEETO. SBC

SOCRATES. Very good; waiting for SBC to get their act together, to ponder the nature of blogging. Shall we begin? Wait, where's Plato?

PLATO. I'm over here, sir. Strictly speaking, you shouldn't be mentioning me.

SOCRATES. That is our custom, I agree, but shouldn't you be taking notes? How are you going to immortalize my thinking in one of your little dialogs?

PLATO. I'm recording everything in my netbook. Then this afternoon I'll have it transcribed using one of Amazon's Mechanical Turk services.

SOCRATES. The engineering of our western colonies never ceases to amaze me. And this transcription will be one hundred percent accurate?

PLATO. Absoglubely.

SOCRATES. Excellent. Let us begin. It would seem that the cause of Glaucon's misfortunes lies in some confusion regarding the nature of a blog. Glaucon, perhaps abetted by the recent Forrester report on the subject, has believed a blog, or rather a blog post, to be one thing, and his clients have understood it to be something else. Perhaps it would serve us well to identify the true nature of a blog.

TWEETO. That's pretty obvious. The name blog comes from the term weblog, which suggests a series of entries posted in serial form on the World Wide Web.

HACKAUN. It's posted using special software that is usually configured to accept comments, so I think part of a blog involves the idea of commentary and dialog.

SOCRATES. Excellent. Who writes blogs?

HACKAUN. Everyone these days. From independent bloggers to programmers to mothers who knit.

FLAKOLES. Many of our clients now have blogs. And we blog ourselves. I've been posting about best practices in PR, for example.

SOCRATES. Now we are getting closer to the matter at hand. First, it is evident that commercial entities, such as Tweeto's firm and your firm, too, Flakoles, have blogs. Let us also point out—which may offer young Glaucon some comfort—that a blog is a written form of communication, and that in many other circumstances, commercial entities expect to pay for written forms of communication that promote their products and services. I am thinking of press releases—which our friend Flakoles here writes so fluently—and white papers, case studies, Web copy, and so on. So I do not think Glaucon's error lies is assuming that companies should pay for promotional writing. They often do, and no one reproves them for it. (No one attacks Cisco or Oracle, for example, for publishing white papers.) No, the backlash, which has crushed our poor friend as mightily as the frothiest wave at Stinson and left him draped over the stone bench there like so much dried kelp, has to do with some other sense of violation. There are other types of writing that treat commercial products and services; trade journalism, for example. It would be offensive, I think we can agree, if Glaucon were offering to pose as a journalist and turn out pixelated prose, measured by the board foot, and adorned, no doubt, with all manner of banner ads and interstitials. We have all seen such so-called news sites, with their gushing prose and their click-through geegaws, and we can all agree, I think, that these sites deserve our opprobrium. But Glaucon wasn't offering to pretend to be such a journalist, from what I understand. He was simply offering to write as himself.

HACKAUN. All bloggers write as themselves. That's what makes blogs so opinionated!

SOCRATES. An astute observation, Hackaun. A blog, unlike many other types of writing, even commercial writing, is written in a personal voice. Can we agree, at least provisionally, that individual authorship and a personal voice are essential elements of a blog?

TWEETO. The personal aspect is what differentiates a blog from the other writing on a Web site.

FLAKOLES. That, and the timeliness. The sense of writing on occasion, reacting to news in the marketplace or even something that has happened in one's household.

HACKAUN. It's the spontaneity makes blogs so interesting, or sometimes so annoying. They offer personal voices, people's real opinions. Even if someone's writing for a company, there's often a disclaimer that their views do not necessarily represent those of the company.

TWEETO. That's a legal disclaimer, of course. Our lawyers insist on it.

HACKAUN. But it also makes the blog more interesting than all the other marketing fluff on a site. Blogs are edgier. Because even if the author works for a big company like Microsoft or SAP, you get the sense that you're reading their genuine thoughts and opinions. They're straight talk.

FLAKOLES. Hackaun is right. And all the blogs from mothers who knit and guys who hang-glide reinforce that idea. You're hearing authentic voices, at least when they're not just link-baiting.

SOCRATES. So Glaucon's error may have been in offering to be authentic for pay. That, truly, would have people wagging there tongues in the polis, or if not the polis, at Stanford Mall.

FLAKOLES. I should say, Socrates, in young Glaucon's defense, that people expect a company's own bloggers to say encouraging things about their products. And though Glaucon is not an employee of any of these companies, he is genuinely excited about their products. He even uses some of them. The speed-dating Web site didn't quite turned out as planned, but he genuinely likes the other products and services he was offering to blog about. He wasn't being insincere. He wasn't offering to fake his enthusiasm. He was simply offering to capture it in writing, which of course would benefit the companies he writes about. I could ask, taking his side for a moment, if he writes something, and it benefits a company, why shouldn't he be paid for it?

HACKAUN. He can be paid for it, there's no law against it, but it violates the sense of trust that readers extend to the authors of blogs. It's fine to put sell your point of view in a white paper; just don't it in a blog. It's the wrong medium.

SOCRATES. Excellent, Hackaun. So we can say that a blog, which originated as a personal medium, retains that personal nature even when it enters the marketplace. And though some blogs, even news blogs, are sometimes shill pieces, promoting companies to which the author serves as an advisor, for example, still we expect the medium to present authentic voices. Can we say that we expect bloggers, enjoying the liberty that circumstances have afford them for spontaneous discussion, to select their own subject matter?

TWEETO. Yes, Socrates.

SOCRATES. Then let me offer the following story, which may illuminate the remaining dark corners of this issue. Our host Tweeto is famous for the wonderful dinners he serves, and he has been gracious enough to invite me to many of these events, where I have eaten heartily and enjoyed the fruits of Bacchus, including a couple of Russian River Pinots in which that merry god really outdid himself—perfect balance of fruit and tannins, nice berry overtones, good finish—but I digress. I remember a dinner laid out not twenty feet from this very courtyard two weeks ago, when we dined sumptuously. The occasion was the granting of a term sheet to young man from the provinces, who had just launched a SaaS B2B offering, for which he had the greatest enthusiasm. I remember that, just as dessert was served, he delivered a long, gushing monologue about his new service. Do you think that was improper?

FLAKOLES. I remember the speech well. The fellow was so excited he didn't notice that his sleeve was resting in the meringue. Improper? No. He was boasting about his own company. Going on a bit perhaps, but not unexpected.

SOCRATES. So even in a conversational setting, in a dialog where one employs one's authentic voice, we don't mind a bit of commercial promotion, as long as it is spontaneous and heartfelt.

TWEETO. Certainly not. I expect that kind of enthusiasm from the people we fund.

SOCRATES. Suppose, however, that though he delivered the same speech with the same passion, you discovered that he had been paid to make it. How would you feel then?

HACKAUN. Offended. That would be incredibly crass. Even the most die-hard salespeople I know wouldn't do such a thing.

FLAKOLES. It would violate all bounds of decency. Paying people to make speeches at parties? Unheard of. Unspeakable.

TWEETO. God forbid, and if you what you say is true, Socrates, we will take up the matter at our next board meeting with the fellow. He may find himself painting curbs in Redwood City.

SOCRATES. I am sure, good Tweeto, that his speech was genuine. I was merely using the man and his loquacious enthusiasm as an example. My story was false, but it has served to guide us closer to the truth of blogs. Blogs, in all settings, present themselves as freely written; they are frank, and they open a discussion the way a frank utterance does. Perhaps the key to your clients' offense lay not in paying for blogging per se. I am sure that in your contract to serve them, you mentioned blogging. Many analysts blog, after all. They are paid by clients, too, and they blog about them. PR agencies blog, sometimes about their practice and sometimes about their clients. The public is not surprised or dismayed by these things. I think our story of the dinner party shows us the nature of poor Glaucon's offense. I expect someone from a company to blog about the company. I expect them to talk about the company, too, perhaps even at a dinner party. But to receive pay for a specific speech or post—to use a medium that is typically spontaneous and conversational—is as offensive as a putting a taxi meter on a dinner table, and charging by the word. I am afraid more Glaucon has sadly miscalculated.

TWEETO. Look at him blubber so. I had thought my garden had gained a second fountain.

HACKAUN. His tears are soaking his toga and showing us the outline of his physique. Would that clouds would come quickly scudding in and darken this scene.

SOCRATES. You may find escape from the aquatic sorrow you're beholding, yet. Look, another intern approaches.

INTERN. I am happy to report that the Internet is back up. I and my colleagues have prepared mocha double-whips for all present, except for Glaucon, whose stomach cannot abide such things. For him, I have set aside a soy chai in a china mug.

TWEETO. Then all is ready. Come, friends, we have solved the riddle of young Glaucon's offense. Let's go within and see what they're writing about today on TechCrunch.


Urn photo by jtstewart, some rights reserved.

Who's Using PaaS? The Answer May Surprise You

When Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) vendor Coghead hit the skids recently, other PaaS vendors such as Intuit QuickBase and TeamDesk were quick to offer Coghead customers free conversion tools and migration solutions, so they could keep their applications running smoothly in the cloud.

I was curious about the customers making this move. Had they been they using Coghead for in-house skunk works, pilot projects, or operational applications? In large companies, did management concerns about data security, SOX compliance, and other regulations relegate PaaS to department-level projects that were, shall we say, off the management radar screen? Is PaaS (when not an extension of a proven SaaS solution such as Salesforce.com or Sugar On Demand) simply a way of getting code up and running without having to requisition a server from a bureaucratic IT department? Or is PaaS something more?

To find out, I emailed TeamDesk, asking about their customers and the types of applications they were running. I promptly received a phone call from Val Karmazin, co-founder of ForeSoft Corporation, the company that offers TeamDesk. Promptness, it turns out, is a habit at ForeSoft. The company prides itself on prompt, reliable customer service.

ForeSoft offers four cloud computing solutions:

• BUGtracka project management and issue-tracking application
  
• dbFLEX, a platform for building business Web applications
  
• CRMdesk, a help desk application
  
• TeamDesk, a platform for building and easily configuring database applications, primarily for the back office
  

The company was founded in 2001. It's been profitable from the start and hasn't taken any outside investment. TeamDesk, launched three years ago, is now the fastest growing part of the business.

In our conversation, Val made a number of interesting points:

• The TeamDesk user community is a mix of people, and most of them aren't developers. What? I thought PaaS would appeal mostly to developers who were comfortable with Ruby, Python, Java, virtualization, and so on. That's not so in the case of TeamDesk. The platform is so easy to use and so easy to configure, thanks to a configuration dashboard, that many of the users are small business owners or IT engineers who know enough about databases to establish a relationship between two tables, but not much technical knowledge beyond that.
  
• Companies of all sizes are using the service. In addition to small businesses, Val named a major telecommunications carrier, a major shipping company, and a European office of a major Silicon Valley technology provider. Company size doesn't predict whether or not a customer will use PaaS; instead, the determining factor is company culture—how willing is the company to trust a PaaS vendor to do things right. Val says customers take advantage of TeamDesk's free trial, discover how easy to use and reliable the service is, and stick with it.
  
• Val points out the distinction between PaaS and SaaS is often illusory. When his customers use his platform to develop business applications that they then rely on day after day, haven't they created in effect a SaaS solution? Read TeamDesk's case study about the sales management application that Hochkoeppler Initiatives created for a customer, and you'll see what he means.
  
• TeamDesk users sometimes require a little more hands-on assistance from ForeSoft when they're getting started with the service, but so far the support workload remains manageable.
  

A couple of conclusions:

• PaaS is ready for prime time: customers are using it for business applications, not just for development projects.
  
• With the proper tools and application user interface, a PaaS vendor can reach beyond the development community to less technical users, broadening the pool of potential customers.
  
• Small, focused cloud computing vendors who execute well can run a profitable business.
  

Business Strategy and PR

If you work for a PR agency or hire PR agencies, ZDNet blogger Jennifer Leggio's recent report on PR firms and social media is a must-read. The report summarizes the results of a survey that Jennifer conducted between November and January. Six hundred forty-two people responded to the survey. "The primary targeted respondents were PR decision-makers at companies with 1,000 or more employees, with small business / start-up owners as secondary targeted respondents."

The heart of the survey examines how well PR firms understand and take advantage of social media. It's relevatory data, but I'd like to call attention to another question the survey touched on: how well PR activity aligns with a company's business strategy.

I've written elsewhere how important it is for a company to create an annual strategic plan, complete with measurable objectives. Once adopted, this plan should direct all major activity in every division and department.

So I was intrigued to see the survey responses to the following statement: "Agency understands how PR needs to fuel entire business strategy, not just news coverage."

Less than a quarter of respondents agreed with this statement (22%), and only 12% strongly agreed with it. Another quarter were on the fence. And fully half of respondents reported that their PR agency did not understand how PR could support the company's business strategy beyond merely getting news coverage.

This breakdown in strategic understanding and execution could explain why, elsewhere in the survey, only 44% of respondents reported that their overall experience with their PR agency had been "good."

What's preventing PR firms from understanding how to support business strategy? I expect the answer is different at different agencies and different clients. But here are some likely explanations:

• The PR form is working by rote. Take product news, take messaging guidelines, craft press release, pitch, brief, distribute. Repeat. Critical analysis and planning isn't part of the process.
  
• The PR team doesn't have a solid understanding of business strategies beyond the strategy of getting coverage.
  
• The client has not adequately explained its strategy to the agency. If the strategy is conveyed at all, it's conveyed by:
  
  
  
  • A VP or CXO stepping into a conference room for 15 minutes to brief the PR team and a couple of marketing people on the company's direction for the year.
    
  • A slide deck that covers high-level trends and initiatives that is emailed over to the PR team.
    
  • A couple of sentences in a messaging document.
    
  
  

In other words, the problem likely lies sometimes in the capacity of PR agencies. Other times, it likely lies in the poor job the client is doing explaining its strategy in the first place. And other times, it's probably a combination of both.

Ideally, a company should be able to presents its strategy in a 5-20-page document that summarizes 5-10 key objectives for the company and supports them with measurable milestones. The document may include a few pages of background material upfront. The objectives should be bold (perhaps BHAGs, as described by Porras and Collins).

A company should be able to present this strategic plan to its PR agency, as well as to every internal employee. It should review its progress against the plan at least quarterly. Of course, it should also review the PR agency's activities against this plan.

There's nothing wrong with a VP or CXO stepping into the room to explain the big picture to the team. And there's nothing wrong with sending lots of background material in the way of slides and white papers to educate the agency. But the more clearly a company enunciates its strategy (through a formal strategic plan), the more likely everyone involved in the company—from internal teams to external agencies—will able to act effectively to achieve important strategic goals.

Pop quiz: If you had detail your company's business strategy to a new PR agency or a new internal hire 15 minutes from now, would you be able to do it?


Big arrow photo copyright, some rights reserved, Mikl Roventine.