The Business Web 2.0

Earlier this year I boldly predicted three trends of the year ahead in social media. With 2009 drawing to a close after a very twelve months, how did I do?

Here's what I said:

PREDICTION 1. Twitter goes mainstream

My position on Twitter altered significantly over 2008 (look back through my posts to see me commenting on its possible demise earlier that year!) and I ended 2009 wondering if it needs to make money at all. Maybe Twitter is, I pondered, a possible new Open Source 'transport' upon which vendors could build applications to enable it to be used for specific aims, such as marketing communications, customer support or even, God forbid, mass mailing? Could Twitter be E-mail Lite?

I predicted more people and companies would be adding Twitter to their Facebook accounts and blogs to enable quick and easy commenting, as well as other utilisations akin to how we use SMS on mobile phones and used to use IM instead of send e-mails. I also guessed that it would continue to reign over any possible competitor.

ASSESSMENT: I was pretty accurate! It's a moot point as to whether Twitter has yet made the mainstream -- if you only watched or listened to the BBC this year then you'd think so, but in spite of user numbers rocketing from 6 million last year to 47 million this, it is not ubiquitous yet. As more and more people move to smartphones with Twitter clients built in though, might it be right on the verge of making the leap to essential?

Those that are using it have matured their view of what they perceive it can do. Many companies are using it to improve their customer service levels and my own company launched a Twitter Sales Leads tool this month to help small companies identify users tweeting a need for what they offer. The commercial and service aspects of Twitter are much more apparent to all. Gone are the days when people tweeted what they had for breakfast!

Twitter hasn't yet gone Open Source though, with a public offering of stock a more likely outcome to help investors see a return on the many tens of millions Biz Stone and his execs raised over the year. But what about revenue, I hear you shout! Wait for early 2010 when it's widely expected Twitter will introduce paid-for business account to supplement the free accounts that exist today.

PREDICTION 2. Web 2.0 meets CRM for the perfect business application

I've written on this before so I am not going to regurgitate what you can read in my other posts. Suffice to say that adding "social" elements to Customer Relationship Management makes, in my opinion, the perfect business application.

I am not alone in thinking this, with back at the start of the year Salesforce.com touting a Facebook Connect option for their Force.com platform and SAP, either behind or ahead of SFDC depending on your point of view, investing in LinkedIn.

When it came to practical demonstrations of Social CRM in action last year, Salesforce.com predictably led the way at their November 2008 Dreamforce conference with a presentation showing user forms in Facebook where the data found its way into their CRM system. But it was pretty lame. And what about some practical B2B use, like collecting user comments from Twitter or mining LinkedIn data?

I suggested there was little doubt it would come this year with massive kudos to the CRM vendor that lights the path, having mastered the data privacy concerns along the way (and convinced Facebook to share "social graph" data). I wasn't prepared to make any guesses as to who would pick up the baton and run with it fastest, other than it wouldn't be Microsoft and Dynamics CRM...

ASSESSMENT: Again, pretty accurate. Salesforce.com tailed the year off with another Dreamforce and a demonstration of its 'Chatter' feature -- a kind of Twitter for enterprises. During the year it also incorporate relevant Twitter trending information into its CRM dashboard to help show how your company is being discussed and to enable those discussions to become part of the way you interface to customers. It's baby steps, but proof that Jeremiah Owyang's prediction, while at Forrester, that ALL CRM system will be social by 2013 could easily come true (well summarised by Brian Solis here: http://bit.ly/2Owb1u).

But progress is slow amongst the traditional CRM leaders, which lorts of bluster from Orcale, SAP, RightNow Technologies and Salesforce.com, but not a real amount of referenceable installations proving they've mastered the new way to do things. This has enabled Social CRM upstarts like Lithium and WeCanDo.BIZ to win a base of support for those sold on the customer relationship implications of the social web -- and who want to do it NOW.

Little doubt this area will move forward much more quickly in the year ahead, with even the simplest interpretations of 'CRM', like Microsoft Outlook, being extended to support interaction with public profiles on social networks.

PREDICTION 3. The age of the niche Social Network

If 2008 was all about everyones' parents joining Facebook and the word "Twitter" entering everyday language, 2009 will be about the growth of niche Social Networks appealing to specific needs or interests, I predicted.

Now I have been crowing about niche SocNets for nearly a year and as yet they haven't really taken off. Ask most people if they want to join a network specifically for geneologists, financial advisers, public speakers or sales leads and they'll tell you that they are already on Facebook or LinkedIn and don't need to join any others (in spite of them potentially better serving the needs which saw them networking in the first place). But the interest they have in the specific use of Social Networks that led to them adding applications or joining groups last year I predicted would drive growth in stand-alone niche networks focused towards those interests in 2009.

Why did I anticipate a different approach? Well we can thank Facebook Connect largely. The main objection to joining networks outside of the mainstream networks to which most people are already members is that it takes time, means yet another password to remember and involves the cumbersome task of building a contact/friend list from scratch. Facebook Connect smashes all of these objections in one go with its ability for one click registration on new sites, using your existing Facebook credentials; plus an ability to bring over your existing contacts to the new network. It even posts back news feed items to Facebook that relate to your activity on the remote networks, so it helps you keep on top of what is happening on each of them in one place.

When the roll out of Facebook Connect starts in earnest, I said, expect niche Social Networks to be perceived as extensions to Facebook, rather than yet another site you need to sign up for.

ASSESSMENT: We're still really waiting for this to happen. Facebook Connect is now the method by which Facebook -- a network that has tripled in size over the year -- encourages third party developers to work, but the remote sites fully integrated back into Facebook (acting as a 'portal' to the social web) are yet to come in any real numbers. This method of working should have been boosted by the success of OAuth, supported by Twitter and LinkedIn by year end, but it's still yet to take off.

I think I was ahead of the game on this one -- I believe it will still happen, but maybe not even in 2010. And the limitation is only really the way in which developers are building sites and applications which are their own community but use information sources made available by 'The Big Three' (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn).

Next month I'll be posting my predictions for 2010. In the meantime, I'd love to hear what you think will be big in social media next year; or even what you think of the predictions I made for the year just ending. Just post a reply below.

Finally, as this will be my last post of the year on ZDNet, let me take this opportunity to thank you for the time you've given my rambling this year and wish you all a peaceful break and a prosperous New Year ahead!

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz

I've personally had a great experience with BT on Twitter. But views expressed on the relaunch of BT Tradespace suggest they don't really understand the power of social media as much as they pretend they do.

Let me start off with evidence that BT does understand Twitter.

I left BT as a customer several years ago for a better offer on combined home phone and broadband. No ill feelings; I just wanted to save money. But BT managed to sully their image with me by subsequently passing my details to their telesales team who over the past few years have frequently called me to try and win me back. It's had the opposite desired effect.

In fact it got so bad that I decided to add my name to the Telephone Preference Service, making it illegal for BT or anyone else to cold call me at home. Still the calls came and the operatives calling on behalf of BT didn't even know what the TPS was, let alone how to get my name off the calling list. After the last call caught me while I was scanning TweetDeck at the same time, I posted a moan on Twitter.

Within 10 minutes I had a message from @BTCare on Twitter expressing their sorrow and aksing me to give them my phone number so they could remove me from their database. I obliged and I have to say, touching wood, that I haven't had a call since. The power of Twitter in business well illustrated, I returned to TweetDeck to applaud BT, delighted that it's using the methods I choose to use to communicate to sort a problem I would have had NO CHANCE of getting fixed on the phone through clueless call centres. I frequently tell this story when I am speaking on the power of Twitter at events or doing social media consultancy, as it helps businesses understand how Twitter can be used.

BT get Twitter I thought.

So image my surprise when I read this week in Computer Business Review an article on the relaunched BT Tradespace, quoting Ivan Croxford, general manager of digital services at BT Business:

"Facebook especially is not that good for B2B, although Twitter is more useful. The clear difference here is that Tradespace is entirely focused on SMBs and giving them an opportunity to market themselves online."

(The full article at http://bit.ly/6GZMGB)

To suggest that BT Tradespace, a social network for business with 350,000 members, provides a better alternative for sourcing and serving customers than Twitter gets me wondering if BT REALLY understands the areas in which it operates and likes to give the impression it understands.

There are 27 million tweets a day, a large chunk of which is people posting requests for recommendations and sharing needs which require matching products or services -- they are asking their contacts, which on a public network like Twitter extends to 47 million people, for help. It's the power of crowd sourcing and word of mouth -- what we usde to do before Google convinced us that a robot and a database provided a better alternative. BT seems to think this either isn't happening or somehow doesn't count as offering business opportunity. By excluding Twitter in this way, not only is BT offering no assistance to SMEs to help them reach those people asking for help chossing suppliers, it's discounting the REAL power of social media in favour of peddling its own alternative. is there more potential in 350,000 users than 47 million? BT seems to think so, so doesn't search Twitter for opportunities.

This is just on Twitter. Ivan is even more dismissive of Facebook, which many consumer focused small businesses are finding is helping them reach new audiences and drive traffic to ecommerce websites (many of which are probably hosted by BT).

It amazes me that a company with BT's clout can't manage to produce something like the Twitter Sales Leads tool we launched this week, which taps into the potential of that service as a lead source. But then if BT doesn't understand what Twitter is about, how is it ever going to think it should be working WITH it for the benefit of small businesses, not against it.

I'd love to read your thoughts on this. Do you think BT is right to write off the new business potential of Facebook and Twitter?

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz

I was asked to speak to a group of recently unemployed people at Whittle College in Chelmsford last night about digital marketing. I gave Google about ten minutes of a two hour talk. And here's why.

The people I met last night were inspirational. Faced with unemployment after the recession left them facing redundancy, each one has embarked on getting themselves trained up in new skills -- mostly project management through Prince II -- to face the job market once more. Several of them were looking at starting their own businesses, joining the 300,000 new businesses recently started in the UK as a result of people finding themselves in the same boat (source: Enterprise Nation suervey at http://www.newbusiness.co.uk/news/300000-home-firms-started-recession). They'd booked onto the Digital Marketing workshop to help them understand how to best market those new business ideas of theirs.

It would sound odd that I barely touch upon Google and search engine marketing/optimisation in a talk on Digital Marketing, but I genuinely believe that the results you can expect to see through that route are a fraction of what's offered on social networks, especially for businesses that are only just establishing themselves.

Let me try and explain two things I've noticed.

First off, how new technology can change behaviour in a generation. When I ring a doorbell I use my index finger. I guess many people reading this article will. Ask someone in the generation below us to ring a doorbell and they use their thumb. Why? Because they spend all their time texting on their mobile phones. They do that more than using a conventional keyboard. So their thumb has become their dominant digit. Mobiles are MUCH easier to use if you lead with your thumb. You only need to look at an older person trying to text quickly with their index finger to see how a generation has adapted.

And that same younger generation also never visits Google. They can't comprehend a web where their friends and contacts aren't instantly on hand. The web to them is Facebook and MySpace. If you want to know something you ask your friends -- just like we did before Google came along, in fact. The idea that you try and get answers from a robot and a database seems to them as old fashioned as our belief that Yellow Pages is the best place to find businesses. Unless Google adapts to support the needs of the generation below us, it could disappear once that same generation is in the workplace and making buying decisions.

Which leads me on to my second view. How useful is Google? Really. I mean if you're looking for a business. I once did an exercise to find a PR company in Huddersfield. I reckon, through other research methods, that there are around 11 PR companies in Huddersfield. If you type "PR company Huddersfield" into Google you get 132,000 responses (there are only 146,000 people live in Huddersfield!). For me, only three of those 11 companies websites get directly referenced on Page 1 of Google. That's a 15% rate of accuracy. And 131,989 results I could really do without.

It's like a conversation with Rain Man! If I asked a friend for a recommendation of a PR company in Huddersfield and he droned for hours about everything that even slightly touches upon the subject, obscuring the information I really asked for with with everything else he knows no matter how poorly qualified or relevant, I'd never ask him again. And yet people think Google is the best thing since sliced bread! Why?

More and more people, even of my generation, aren't going to Google for answers any more. They are tapping into the crowd available to them through sites like Facebook and Twitter. Why search through databases of historical documents for something you need when you now have access to millions of people to ask? We're going back to what we used to do before we relied on Google to give us answers, as we can now millions of people sit behind my keyboard and screen, only 140 characters away.

And with this comes enormous potential for businesses. While many companies with established ways of thinking are scrapping over the top positions on Google through expensive SEO or even more espensive Pay Per Click programmes, I think the smart money is heading towards tapping into social networks and listening out for people who are quite happy to share a need. And with every need comes a sales lead!

Here's an exercise to prove the point. Try going to Twitter search and typing "i need" and a keyword that describes something you do. Then try "can recommend" and another keyword. Then "can suggest". And then try all the keywords associated with your business. Surprised by how many people ask for recommendations of suppliers of products and services that match yours on Twitter? Why would you be! It's word of mouth marketing brought into our super-connected era. And these people want answers. They don't care who gives them necessarily, so long as it's from a real person that they perceive to have considered their response. A result of that kind from a real human being beats an algorthimic response on Google any day.

And this is what smart new businesses are exploiting. Using tools, of which my own companies Twitter Sales Leads tool is just one, it's possible to monitor Twitter and other social networks to look for instances where someone is posting a need for what you do. And this is a real sales lead! It's so much better qualified than a click from Google at 50p a go. With Google marketing you pay for the click in the hope that a number of those visitors to your website lift the phone or fill out a form to start a conversation about whether you can help them. My guess is that 2% of those costly clicks will do that; the other 98% are worth nothing. On Twitter, you get to speak to someone with a need directly -- you're already in the sales cycle. And what does it cost? Twitter Search is free, but even the fee for the tools to better filter results to focus only on prospective sales leads are minimal compared to what most companies are prepared to throw at Google and SEO/SEM experts.

The way people are using the Internet is changing. And with it businesses need to change how they engage with customers. Start using your thumbs rather than your index finger!

I'd welcome your comments.

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz

Should Software-as-a-Service vendors make the switch to charging for their offering based on business outcome? Laurent Lachal of Ovum believes so.

I was a delegate at the Cloud Computing World Forum a couple of weeks ago and out of a day of interesting presentations, the one that fascinated me the most was from Laurent Lachal, senior analyst and the guy leading Ovum’s Cloud Computing research.

The statement Laurent made during his 15 minutes presentation that made me sit up was his assertion that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendors, specifically CRM system vendors, should look towards moving to their fee model to one based on business outcome: “Why not have a CRM vendor charging for their software by the number of leads?” he asked.

As someone involved in what we used to call “Hosted CRM” it hit me hard. Salesforce.com, in particular, has moved the Customer Relationship Management software market on by ridiculing the old model of customers paying a vendor heaps of money up front to install a complex system only, in many cases, to see it fail. SFDC has done much to champion the cause of Software-as-a-Service, delivering business applications over the web for an ongoing subscription fee, spreading the cost of applications over their lifetime as an operational expense, as an alternative to a large upfront capital investment. In fact, Salesforce.com has build an entire platform on this principle with the support of many other software companies whose applications are now available on the same basis. Even Microsoft, which has got the size it has through selling software licences, often emblematically packaged in a box, is now deploying applications over the web on a subscription basis.

“Success, not software” shouts the Salesforce.com website. But Laurent’s point is that customers are handing over money whether they are successful or not. Why can’t what you pay be linked to the rewards enjoyed by using the software?

I had to know more about want Laurent was thinking and he was kind enough to spend an hour with me this week to discuss the logic behind his comments.

Laurent harks back to the roots of Cloud Computing, where applications ran on remote mainframes. An example he gives is High Street travel agents, who sell flights from a screen linked to an airline reservation system – a “hosted application” a la SaaS. The application is available to them all day long and is pivotal to their business, but the service is provided free, with fees only paid when airline tickets are sold. Granted, the business model isn’t quite the same as, say, a consultancy company using a CRM system to track complex opportunities with their customers, but Laurent questions whether the same fee model couldn’t be used all the same.

His logic is that Salesforce.com, again as an example, holds a lot of back-end data on how many contacts each of their customers hold in their CRM systems; how many leads they have; what proportion of those convert to opportunities; and then statistics on revenue generated from those opportunities. Salesforce.com has the data to prove its system is helping to close leads and generate business; to shorten sales cycles. Why doesn’t SFDC bill based on the tangible difference it has brought to the performance of a customer sales team? Another example: email marketing applications from Vertical Response or Constant Contact bill you for emails sent, but they also hold data on who clicks through, so why not bill on traffic sent to your website instead?

It’s an interesting thought and it hadn’t really occurred to me that this data might exist and be usable. Laurent suggests that a vendor gives you the application for free but supports your own objective of gaining business benefit; and let’s face it, if the CRM system is making a big difference to your business then you’re unlikely to have an issue paying more than the current, for Salesforce.com, £65 per user per month for it. Those that need help to see business benefits would pay less, possibly nothing in the worst cases, but could be provided, potentially sold, additional services to improve uptake, increase data relevancy, refine sales processes, better use the marketing tools or whatever to see more effective use of the system: more leads, better conversion rates, shorter sales cycles, a bigger revenue contribution per sales head. The aim for both sides would be achieving greater business benefits from the system, bringing them to a point where they are paying a fair amount for the application, proportional to business outcome.

Outwardly this would seem to sway all the benefits in favour of the customer, and all the risk to the vendor, but if you think that it would be very much in the CRM vendor’s interests to see the system being used well and bringing real benefits to customers, then the balance evens out if the vendor is living up to its promises. It’s No Win, No Fee application provision.

I raised with Laurent the issue of data privacy, but we concluded that a vendor wouldn’t need to know the detail of a customer’s customers, just a rolled-up and anonymised view of overall performance for them to measure the efficacy of that customers’ use of the system.

Laurent’s thinking is so far from the norm that you can’t help but pick holes in it compared to what we have in place today. But traditional on-premise vendors started taking a kicking ten years ago when SaaS vendors like Salesforce.com, Salesnet, Upshot (which got bought by Siebel and is now part of Oracle) and Netsuite pitched in offering a subscription model which has since become the norm. With a stack of data now able to support claims of real business improvement, is it time to look at the fee model again?

Could one of the many new entrants to the Social CRM space looking to dislodge the new encumbents similarly upset the market with a billing model linked to business outcome?

Laurent has not yet published anything on this, but he’s serious about his thoughts and seems convinced that it’s likely to be the way SaaS application vendors will head. After an hour in his company I think it has merit and we are seriously considering it for our own Social CRM application.

I’d be interested to read your thoughts.

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz

As Google and Bing scrabble to lead the move towards Real Time Search, are they missing the point?

I admit I've always had issues with search engines and the SEO/SEM industry that rides its coat-tails. First off, if I am looking for something specific I rarely want 48,000,000 pages to sift through to find it. I'd rather have a handful and for them be highly relevant. If I asked a friend for some opinion or advice and they reeled off for several hours about a whole load of stuff that barely brushes on what I am talking about, Rain Man like, I'd probably never bother asking them again. And yet it seems totally acceptable for search engines to do the same.

An example. Search Google for "PR companies Huddersfield". It comes back with 146,000 responses. Now, there are only 11 PR companies in Huddersfield and the town only has a population of 146,000. Unless every single resident has PR expertise, or those 11 companies have managed to generate over 13,000 of content each, there is a whole heap or barely relevant tripe that Google is feeding back to me. Only 4 of the 11 companies actually get a mention on the first page of results and, as we know, not many people go beyond that first page when looking for answers. So at best Google has come back with worse than 40% accuracy on my request.

Good enough? Well, potentially not as good as asking people you know for a recommendation of a PR company in Huddersfield, which is what social media enables you to do. More and more people, especially those with Twitter desktop (and mobile) client TweetDeck open all day, are simply turning to Twitter to ask their followers for specific recommendations. They may not get a response -- and it may not be immediate -- but when they do they'll get something very, very relevant, usually with the value of a word of mouth recommendation attached to it. Google knows this is happening and is panicking enough to rush Real Time search results into the mix -- you can now filter Google results by those posted in the past hour, for example.

But whether it's real time or not -- and I don't believe "Past hour" IS real time -- it misses the point of why people are gravitating towards asking for business recommendations of contacts on Twitter and other social networks rather than turning to Google for responses which aren't in the slightest bit considered. In fact, the only level of qualification, if you can call it that, is that the ones you get first in your results have mastered search engine marketing and search engine optimisation, rather than than the PR, printing, telesales or skills you're actually looking for. The best at providing the specific service you need don't get listed first, as might actually be useful.

All this reminds me of a debate I got into with the managing director of an online business directory some time ago in a forum. We discussed his site, a pure directory of businesses, against mine at WeCanDo.BIZ where we have a directory (it's just a part of our site) but listed first are those with the highest number of endorsements from customers. He smugly pointed out to all reading the forum that he'd searched his site for an accountant and got 24,000 results; he'd searched our site and (at the time) got 6 results. I pointed out that no one wants 24,000 accountants, they typically want just one and for them to be good -- and being able to pick the most suitable from a short list was more useful than throwing a dart at a wall papered with Yellow Pages listing. He didn't argue against it.

So what could Google or Bing offer as a more credible alternative to pages or irrelevant twaddle, placed only through the "skill" of a search engine guru? Well, Twitter-like networks of their own that could be polled for a response might be a solution. But many have tried to emulate Twitter from scratch and failed. Perhaps being able to simultaneously tweet your search request to your own network of followers would help, so that as well as the 146,000 results from Google's servers you could have a proper real time update of responses from your Twitter followers on the same page? Twitter offers OAuth to enable us to be logged into Twitter while on other sites which can then use Twitter's features, so not hard to do if Google or Bing felt so inclined.

Or you could wait to see what Facebook does now it has web search on its site and Friendfeed waiting to be integrated into the site proper. It would be quite possible with the tech they've got to offer alongside traditional web search an ability to simultaneously broadcast your request to your Facebook users, as well as potentially any other network (including Twitter) you have connected to your FriendFeed. Could the social media sites themselves point to a new future for search?

Either way, "search" is changing with the power of crowd-sourcing attached and I, for one, cannot wait!

Your thoughts are always welcomed; just post a reply below.

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz