From Web 2.0 to Office 2.0: How the Social Web

Will Impact Our Working Lives

Troy Angrignon& Ean Jackson

presenting to

The High TechCommunicatorsExchange

April 29, 2006

(Catherine) - 6:15pm•Ean:

•Sales and Marketing guy from Oracle, IBM, and Sprint International•Has mentored and advised 25 startups in sales and marketing•Professor at University of Phoenix teaching applied technology in the MBA program•Former Board member of the IIMA•Currently President of Analytics Marketing where he coaches startups on how to grow their business by leveraging technology•Ean hopes to run his hundredth ultra-marathon within the next year.

•Troy•Has spent the past twelve years doing business and technology strategy.•Has built four ventures, the last of which was a computer consulting practice here in Vancouver for ten years but is now assisting in building four more companies. He is currently the Director of Strategy for Hinchlcliffe and Company, a US-based company specializing in Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 consulting, training, advisory work, and media. He is also an advisor and mentor to several startup and non-profit boards.•Was •He was formerly the Emerging Technology Strategist for Business Objects, where he was responsible for looking at emerging market opportunities.•He is an active outdoor athlete who spends his time doing power-lifting, gymnastics, running, biking, and anything else that gets him outside with friends.

Who are you? And what do you wantout of this presentation?

Ean - 6:20pm•who are we and why are we here?•Ean introduces Troy: We are friends; we work on a board together; he wanted to understand this web 2.0 stuff so he decided to write a Manifesto; today is a preview of the Manifesto that answers the questions: What is web 2.0, why do I care? What do I do about it?•Troy introduces Ean: Ean has been teaching e-business for six years; about 18 months ago his students started asking what web 2.0 was and so Ean went off searching; Ean invited me to join his socially conscious web 2.0 related startup venture and we also began collaborating on the Manifesto.

•who are you and why are you here?•what type of organization? Business, non-profit, Individual•what function / role? Geeks? Businessperson? Other? Management? Apply technology? Entrepreneur?•technical skill levels? Super Geek, Technically

Internet marketing & PR continues to move forward in leaps and bounds

(Ean)•have been involved in one shape or another since starting Canada’s first ISP in 1993•the one constant has been change!•Netscape, Websites, Dot-com bust, Google, SEO, blogging, Web 2.0

Forward thinking communicators want to make best use of the new technologies

(Ean)•the one constant is that as the technology changes, we are always there at the leading edge trying to figure out how to make it work for us or our clients business

But the technology keeps changingso fast that it’s hard to keep up!!

(Ean)•It feels like as soon as you learn something, they change the rules!•Something new is here!•Out with the old, in with the new!

We want to know what the new tools are, what they mean, and how to use them

(Ean - 6:25pm)•...and if we know those things, we know how and when to apply them to our unique business issues

Agenda

• What is Web 2.0?• Making Use of Web 2.0 Tools• Real-world Case study• Q&A Session

So in the next hour or so, we’re going to cover the following items

Web 2.0 is really about the web being a platform for people to work together

(Troy)

Web 1.0

•It’s the year 2000. We have spent five years just getting people and companies online.•There has been an explosion of websites. These sites are for the most part made up of static pages and files. They are read-only sites. •No matter how many people are on the site, you really can’t tell. •You click a page....and you wait. Both because you have dial-up and because every time you click on something or submit a form, it has to reload a page. You find yourself wishing that it didn’t suck so much - that it worked more like your desktop applications - smooth, fast, simple. •But then again, those desktop apps aren’t so great either. They’re huge and bloated and buggy and they never fix the old bugs, they just charge you once every 18 months for a new version that has NEW bugs. But still, the desktop PC and the desktop operating system reigned supreme.•Applications got bigger, learning curves got steeper and the percentage of features that people knew how to use got smaller.•Enterprise vendors talked about “lock in”, “switching barriers” and many other user-hostile approaches.•Speaking of your desktop, you probably filed your mail away in folders and your files too, all carefully sorted so that you could find them again. Because if you couldn’t find it yourself by knowing where it was, you would never see it again.The paradigm was all about folders and directories.•Amazon and eBay are two of your favourite applications...but at this point, the only way to connect to them is as a user directly hitting the site. There is no way for developers to connect into their back-end systems...yet. •DoubleClick is one of the largest advertising networks on the planet. 2000 advertisers that can buy banner ads on websites and track you by cookies across the web.•AOL has a huge walled garden of content protected from the web and it’s considered “a clean, well lighted place” for those who are too scared of the wild west Internet. This theme of putting data in behind a wall and charging for access is one of the more common place business models.

Web 2.0

Troy - 6:35pm•A little experiment formed called NuPedia...•Web Services, an academic curiousity became real. Amazon Web Services made $211M last year. eBay sold almost half of its inventory through web services that were called from other web sites, not from eBay’s website. Remixing of web content was born.•Dale Dougherty coined a phrase for all of this new new stuff: Web 2.0.•Tim O’Reilly picked up on the theme and held a conference to explore the concepts to see if they were real. Much debate ensued about the definition and meaning of this phrase •Google decided to launch an ad network like Doubleclick. 200,000 micro advertisers jumped on board.•An oddly named company called Del.icio.us started letting people share their bookmarks with each other and “tag” them. •A little known company in Vancouver named Ludicorp•Some of the surviving ASP companies (NetSuite, JamCracker, OpSource, Salesforce.com) licked their wounds, kept on innovating and kept pushing forward. •We tipped over the billion users mark, a quarter or third of which are online at any one time.•Small, fast, light applications started to explode. Blogs, wikis, and RSS took the world and the popular media by storm.•Digg was born - imagine having the whole planet as your editorial board. Ten people run a site that now has more traffic than the NYTimes.•Collaboration, co-creation, community, collective intelligence. cpmmectopms. content creation, change of scale, core values, and cheap and fast all went crazy.•Moved from folders to search•The death of walled gardens•A little company called 37 Signals launched and built some light, fast applications that got a lot of press.•Social networks exploded.•Young entrepreneurs are slightly less arrogant•Blogs went from near zero in March 2003 to 55M in September 2006 - nobody could have

There are only a few ways to make money or save money in marketing

(Ean - 6:35pm)•Generate Revenue by...

•Acquiring new customers through marketing activities and product innovation•Retain and grow customer base through product innovation, account management, cross-sell/up-sell, and retention•Strengthening the pricing you can get through demand/supply mgmt and pricing optimization

•Decreasing your operating margins by....•Improving customer interaction efficiency

•Marketing & Advertising•Sales•Customer Service & Support•Order Fulfillment & Billing

•improving corporate services efficiency•HR

•decreasing cost of goods sold•product development•distribution•service delivery

(Ean)Here are some key examples of applications that might be able to help you drive your business forward.

Your brand isn’t what you say it is,it’s what Google says it is.

Company Valuation $1.9B

Sites set up by pissed off customers for $30

Damage to reputation: PRICELESS

(Ean - 6:40pm)

We have known for a long time that being found on the internet is important. That is why SEO is such a big thing to marketers.What you might not know is that next after domain names, the next best and most powerful way to get found on Google is to blog...

Blogs weigh more than almostall other SEO tactics combined

Blogs

SEO

(Troy •Because of the way blogs work, they ping the search engines and are more current than normal static sites. •Therefore they get high Google rank.•This is the number one reason that every single one of your customers should have a blog that talks about them and their business!!

If you want to know what is going on, join the blogosphere

(Troy - 6:55pm)•The blogosphere has become our community conversation. Read it for competitive and industry analysis. •But also...write it...•There are many things that it can help your company achieve!•From Debbie Weil’s excellent book “The Corporate Blogging Book”:

•market your company/product/service•be a thought leader•build community•provide customer relations•offer up status alerts•host conference/event information•advocate for change•provide an additional channel for PR•drive a global brand•find and develop customer evangelists•build a web site without building a web site

Is your PR command and control?Or conversational?

Marketing: blogs can be used to establish thought leadership. There are a lot of blogs out there it's true. But we're still at a stage where a blogger can quickly become one of the leading voices simply by being very focused on their niche. There are probably not a thousand bloggers blogging about how to build great bird houses or how to knit. Even in the business space, there are still relatively few top bloggers in every business category so if your content is compelling and you can market yourself to the other bloggers in your space, it is possible to become well-known in your niche relatively quickly

Cost-effective communications: Scoble and Isreal write: "Because blogs are also the lowest-cost communications channel, you can reach thousands, perhaps millions of people for an investment of a few cents and some personal time. Blogs are infinitely more efficient than any other corporate communications medium.” (Naked Conversations, P 27)

Public Relations: moving from traditional command-and-control PR to PR being people who understand that "marketplaces are conversations". This paragraph from Naked Conversations so perfectly sums up this issue that I need to quote it in full:

"How did this industry [PR] end up with such a tainted image? A long string of scandals helped. By reading the papers, one can get an impression of an ongoing collusion between PR agencies and large organizations intent on deceiving the public. There’s also a language barrier. PR people are accused of speaking in an oymoronic mix of risk-avoidant and hyperbolic language that most people don’t trust. In addition, PR folk are considered flak-catchers who stand in front of the press to take heat and deflect it from clients. The result is that a large number of people see the PR practicioner intentionally blocking the path to the truth, someone who guides company spokespeople to manipulate the message around the actual facts to the advantage of the company and at the expense of the public’s right to know. Bloggers enjoy the opposite reputiation. They write in the plainest of launguage, so unrefined that postings sometimes scream for a good edit. They are prone to tell it like it is, even if “it” is unflattering to the companies they represent. Whereas the PR practitioner’s loyalty is assumed to be to the client, the blogger’s loyalty is perceived to be to the public at large. We are, of course, talking about perceptions here, and not realities. The reality is that some bloggers are not saintly, and some embellishments slip past the wary eyes of the blog-watchers. Likewise, not all public relations practitioners deserve the harsh rap. In fact, we see two schools of PR in practice today. One is the incumbent school of “command and control.” This school argues that companies should keep communicating in the same manner and with the same rules that they have always practiced and perhaps a dab of makeup to cover up the warts of their profession. Some of the smartest in the field are rapidlly transitioning from traditional to more conversational practices, creating a new “listen and participate” school of thought in PR. This latter group plays by rules that are in striking contrast to the command and controllers. We think this transformation into two schools is important to the field because the profession appears to us and many we spoke with to be in upheaval and facing a change or perish challenge, denied by many and embraced by a few up until now....By contrast, many of the Listen-and-Particpators blog, and they’re good at it. They understand blogging has already disrupted the status quo of their professions and have adapted to the change, to the benefit of both their clients and themselves. Most still embrace a good number of traditional tactics, which in many cases makes sense. But you can see their hearts and minds transitioning to new forms of communication, including using blogging to change the rules of the game from a one-way monologue to a two-way conversation." (Naked Conversations, P 100)

PR is an absolutely critical function in any company. But good PR people realize that their industry is changing and that new tactics are becoming more useful and some tactics are becoming less useful. What type of PR are your practicing? Command and control? Or conversational? You might want to go and find out.

Reputation/Perception: Tom Peters wrote: Robert Scoble, single-handedly at first, has given the EVIL EMPIRE (Microsoft, who els?) a “Human Face”...thanks to his blog." Scoble did this by being himself, calling it as he saw it, which included praising the iPod, and slamming Microsoft when they screwed up. That honesty gave him huge points with his readers so that they knew when he said he saw something positive in Microsoft, that he wasn't just parroting the company PR. Microsoft has over 10,000 internal bloggers and over 3,000 external bloggers so Scoble wasn't alone in shifting the tide of public opinion but he was a big part of it.

Direct unfiltered communications FROM your customer: Companies are fond of doing customer surveys. You know the ones. They have 20-30 questions that all sound the same and a bunch of multiple choice answers that don't really capture what you mean. And that number rolls up to the Executive who say something like, "Hmmmm....we have a 7." So what? Do they know what to do to get an 8? Or a 10? Getting plain, open, honest, real communication from customers or partners is a HUGE benefit to a company. And the way to do this is to be scanning the blogosphere for mentions of your names

What if you could measure everything for return on investment? You can.

(Images from ClickTracks)

(Troy-7pm)•There are all sorts of tools out there that let you optimize your marketing efforts across all of your various online activities, including:

•Omniture•WebSideStory•Optimost•Google Analytics•Visual Sciences

Figure out what your business needs in terms of measurement and analytics tools and do an assessment. There are MANY choices out there.

Build a community of like-minded individuals

(Ean) 7:05•There are tools out there that will let you build a community of interest around anything. •Some of the tools include:

•Yahoo/Google groups•MySpace/FaceBook/Cyworld groups•Second Life!•Drupal/Plone/Expression Engine•even just group blogs!

Here are some tools that will help you drive your marketing efforts online:

(Troy - 7:10pm)•blogging tools (Wordpress, Typepad, Blogger)•survey tools (surveymonkey, zoomerang)•email newsletter tools (constant contact, intellicontact) •registration tools (sporg, active.com, cvents)•payment tools (paypal, beanstream)

Here are some tools that you can useto manage your business

Troy - 7:15pm•Wikis: Jotspot, Socialtext, Confluence•Project mgmt: Basecamp, BackPack•Office 2.0 applications: Writely, Zoho Suite•Google Apps (Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar for your company)

Let’s examine a real company that used Web 2.0 technologies in order to grow

Ean

I was a fat kid

When I got to university, I had a beer bet

My roommate challenged me to a run

We bet

A case of beer

I lost

•But I found I really enjoyed running. •It became my hobby. •I ran 36 marathons before taking up triathlons. • I did Ironmans and double Ironmans. •Then I took up ultramarathons and have done almost 100 of them

•Along the way I made it to a couple of national teams. Then I coached and managed one.

•After being in lots and lots of races, one day I decided to put one on myself. •I called it the Vancouver Fat Ass 50 because in ultramarathon circles, a fat ass run means a free one that has no frills. • I held it on New Years Day. We ran almost 50 miles, then went for a swim in the ocean…then went for beers. •It was not as popular as the Sun Run

•Did this a few times. •Before I knew it, my little FA 50 was consistently getting national TV coverage. •100’s of nutbars began to show up. It became a pain in the fat ass for me to manage

•So I piddled with FrontPage and made a website. •Hoped by getting people to read about the event and register for it online, I wouldn’t have to do paperwork

•Then, for the 10th anniversary (sorry, couldn’t find 10th!) a running buddy who does web design made me a “real” website.

•Around about then, I joined to IIMA•Learned about keywords and reciprocal links and the need for newsletter

•like Forrest Gump, I continued to run•Like in the movie Forrest Gump, people started to follow!

•Others wanted me to help them put on free running races, so my wife started a club

•Needed a payment engine so we bolted one on

•Like good marketers, we wanted to survey our members, so we bolted on a survey tool

•Needed newsletter management so we bolted one on

•Then I met some guys at the Steamworks one night and we had a few beers. •Roland Tanglao and Boris Mann, who have also spoken to the IIMA•I talked to them about our pains as we grew the business. It couldn’t scale up to where we wanted to with the existing infrastructure and Front Page. •If we added lots of events, it was just too tedious to manage. •They said “We have a solution to that!”

•They said, “Hey we’ve got a tool that can be used to build online communities! •They said they valued feedback for their new community platform and would host the club site for free. •Best of all, they said that it would take an hour to set up and that it could do all of the things we’d bolted on and more! •I said “sign me up!”

7:20pm•We figured this would be a good time for a new image for the club. •The folks at Rain City were new with the Drupal platform and hot for referral business, so they too offered to join us by creating a look and feel for the Club•We were flying high!

•Reality was SLIGHTLY different than we hoped•I am a big boy and I have experienced lots of ports from one platform to another, but this was the most painful port I had ever experienced. •I conservatively estimate that to migrate from the FrontPage site to the Drupal site, it took not one, but well over 1000 hours.•Without a doubt the biggest problem was getting technical help. It’s hard to get good people if you have no money•The free help ran out and we

•But, thanks to our friends at Bryght and Rain City, this is what we migrated to

•Photos are important to a community site. We now use Flickr. It works fine and has done wonders for SEO

•For the volunteers who manage the club, we use online collaborative tools. We used writely for a while, but shelved it in favor of Jot.•We did use it however to collaboratively write the outline of this presentation!

•This is Jot, a tool we pay $10/month for to keep track of goals and progress toward them

•This is BaseCamp, a free tool for project management

•Registration module

RSS feedsAnd it seems that if 55 million bloggers started, at least ONE stopped!

•It’s got blogs, so members can trash talk about each other online. It amazes me how many people read about other people’s adventures. It’s great for search engine rankings

7:30pm•Now that we have gotten here....surprise, surprise....we have a new business issue to address and more technology decisions to make•Online marketing is a never ending cycle. Just when you think you’ve got it wired, they change the rules or your business changes, and you have to rethink things again•Our new business issue is: Do we maintain the status quo and remain a neat regional club? Or do we raise some money and take the thing global?•From the tech infrastructure and Internet marketing perspectives, the biggest issue is build or buy. Do we keep on cobbling stuff together and depend on our friend’s handouts? Do we build our own custom platform or do we find a platform that does what we need if the club is to grow and use it?

Great communicators want to stay on the leading edge but things keep changing!

(Troy)

Decide on your business goals and pick the right tools to help get you there

(Troy)

Now that you know what to do,it’s time to act!

(Troy)

With the knowledge you

have gained today, we hope

that you and your family will

prosper!

(Troy)

Q&A

Ean JacksonPresident,Analytics Marketingejackson@analyticsmarketing.comCell: (604) 904-6554

Troy AngrignonAdventure Capitalistwww.troyangrignon.comtroy@troyangrignon.comtwitter: troyangrignon

Ean opens up the floor.