Thinkervine

You may live well in creativity, just like Mickey Mouse in the imaginary. But you’ll only find the true accomplishment once creativity turns into productivity.

Thoughts ?

Branding seeks to increase the customer’s perceived value on your product or services. Marketing campaigns through all different channels (above the line, below or through the line) have always relied on mainly two factors to increase the embrace of the product they advertise: Creating value then let the word-of-mouth game start. And it is well known to all marketers that a satisfied customer earns you 3 others and a dissatisfied one makes you lose 10 more.

Technology has known a disruptive evolution. And a disruptive technology means opportunity and risk. With the appearance of the web platforms and social networks, these rules still apply, though the impact is multiplied by thousands. This is mainly due to the new exposition and virality through which news spread across the web. An upset blogger can, in hours, easily destroy the reputation of your brand or product and force you into a crisis cell to manage this issue. You may well remember the “Failure” Google Bombing against president Bush or the Dave Caroll case with United Airlines. And thing is, word-of-mouth doesn’t remain within the inner friends circle, but as stated Universal McCann, behaviors have evolved, and people started to believe strangers.

To avoid these kind of marketing disasters, it is highly advised to have a proper management of your brand online, at the core of your marketing and PR strategy, and to maintain a reputation in adequation with the standards you’re looking forward off the Internet.

So you’re going to ask: How do I manage my brand online ?

Managing an e-reputation can go from basic operations to a very complex strategy. Whichever the level at which you choose to engage your brand management, there are three points that you will need to address:

• Monitoring
• Engaging the conversation
• Optimizing your web presence

The first step is to monitor your brand and your products, evaluate the perception on the web, what people have to say about it. This search should not be limited to search engines results but to blogs, social networks, video websites, social bookmarking websites, local search sites and forums.

During the monitoring process, you will probably come across dissatisfied customers and customers requiring information on the company or specific products. It is highly advised to engage the conversation, provide additional information. If you encounter a negative review, take the time to understand the reviewer’s point of view, apologize and ask for details on which aspects lead the customer to have an unpleasant experience, ensure that the issue will be addressed. Sometimes, this might lead to the reviewer softening his critic. But at no time should you engage an argument with the customer.

On the other side, you should avoid any posting of a false review or “ad”-comment. Should anyone find out, and usually people do, your brand will lose any credible voice it has gained through your efforts.

You should also think about optimizing your presence. Rather than having a reactive action in order to bury the negative reviews, assert a good positioning of your brand in every media channel you can have a presence in. These channels are pretty much the same as the ones you will be monitoring. You should define KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) in order to define whether your brand is gaining in popularity or whether it is diving in the abyss. Having an optimized web presence is structuring factor in gaining loyal consumers.

Identify loyal evangelists, these are your best success channel. One single post by one single person might propel you into the top 10 trends, be it positive or negative. Today Consumer Generated Contents have a major influence on sales and e-commerce. Identify who these people are, what’s their (hi)story with your brand and products, find your allies and create a network. Jeff Bezos (Amazon) said: “We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”. To enhance this experience, you may engage your faithful customers into a community and have them help you build your brand’s image, just the way Lego did with Universe or Starbucks with My Starbucks Idea. The authentic passion for the brand allows you to generate a higher and closer customer engagement, to the point of involving them into your product creation (eg: Pepsi Cans design).

Let your employees be your voice, not just executives. Your employees engagement could be a major ally to your brand. Define employees communication/social media strategy, allow them to share their thoughts on the company and the products. People are willing to follow their postings to get an internal insight on the brand.

On another hand, it is as much important to track the competition and keep up 5 moves ahead to avoid the checkmate.

Brand management is not just about PR, unlike what most companies think. It takes a proactive action from marketing with an alignment with the company’s global strategy. PR should be seen as a vessel to carry out the message.

Thinkervine is glad to offer to those who wish Google Wave invites.

By now, these have been rolled out to pretty much most of you, but if some still don’t have one, feel free to leave a comment to request one (make sure to input your Gmail account in the e-mail field).

26 invites are available.

If you don’t know what Google Wave is, check out the videos below:

SAP Research developed an application, named Gravity, leveraging the Google Wave collaboration capabilities for Business Process Management, check the demo here:

No need to deny it. We have all gone mobile. We are addicted to our small devices and we are constantly carrying them with us and checking them permanently. Smartphones, notebooks, netbooks, mobiles. We have quite few usages for them, going from the standard e-mail to m-commerce.

With the advent of mobile Internet and the maturity of devices to provide an enhanced user experience onto the mobile web, the rate of adoption of smartphone, amongst other mobile devices has highly increased.

Gartner released the figures of smartphones market shares on Q1 2009 and it says it all:

Through this growth, a very important market is emerging for mobile applications. The growth of the App Store (nearly 100,000 applications and over 2 Billion downloads) and the Android Store (approx. 10,000 apps) are good sign for it. So why wouldn’t business applications benefit from this trend ?

Although, most would think mobile applications are more valuable in a B2C business model, M-Apps might bring a great value to the enterprise through several channels:

• Increase productivity : users would be able to interact with the systems at any time. They might leverage lose time to do expanses or validate workflow items.
• Gain real-time access to enterprise information : In a customer facing situation, your representative is able to access the CRM application and get an up-to-date profile of the customer his is visiting.
• Workforce automation : If your company has a mobile workforce (sales, agents), mobile applications allow them a better autonomy and proactivity by providing them real-time access to the applications. Sales representatives in malls are able to report their sales in real-time, which would allow marketing to take real time decisions and apply a special sale for a specific product to attract more customers.

Making a business application available to mobile users isn’t likely to approach playing with a magic wand. It should go through a set of considerations before starting the project.

Selecting the appropriate candidate

Not every application is a good candidate to go mobile. This should go through a thoughtful selection process. At first, you should define all the criterias that make an application eligible to this port, for example regular access by mobile population, online and offline access, ability to simplify screens and processes and adapt them to the mobile usage, real-time access to information, ease of porting, customer accessible application, criticity, value to the enterprise etc…

As part of your mobile strategy, you should think of first going live with a pilot before diving into a larger roll-out. For example, you’d first make it available to a small set of population (sales or IT) before giving access to the rest of users.

Usability

Mobile devices, whether they are smartphones or netbooks have low and different resolution screens. They also have a variety of access methods: either through a pointer, a touch screen or some kind of pad. Your application should be adaptable and able to run of these various platforms, in a easy flowing way. A high focus should be put in the usability and ensure that users are able to interact easily with the application without having to forever scroll or suffer from cropped texts. You’d also think about light screens where you’d privilege a low number of inputs and buttons to avoid confusion.

On the other side, you should ensure that the used technologies are widespread enough to run on most platforms unless you build different applications for the main platforms. If the mobile version of your application is not web based, you might want to consider to provide offline access. For example, a user might want to record his time entries while in a train (with no Internet access). The next morning, while at the office, he would be able to sync/push the recorded information to your HR application.

Security

You should define the security policies pertaining to your mobile application. If the devices are not members of the enterprise network and not using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) connection, this means they should be accessible through the Internet, hence the systems are potentially exposed to external threats. You should also deal with losableness and theft cases. In this case, strangers might get an access to the enterprise data through the lost device. Your policies should include processes to quickly react and disallow the access for this particular device/user until the account has been secured.

Mobile applications will play a good part in the future of the extended enterprise. As people tend to gain in mobility and technologies gain maturity in being reliable platforms, a real value should be leveraged by taking advantage of transporting the enterprise in one’s briefcase.

Most business application consultants and experts have a high emphasis in one aspect of the solution (say finance, controlling, HR, CRM), sometimes, they even go to higher focus (marketing campaigns within the CRM) but very few of them would know what happens in the next phase of the process. They usually work in a blackbox mode knowing the input they’re getting from previous phase, how to process it before serving it to the next phase.

This has worked pretty well due to the widely spread practices in the implementation of processes within monolithic solutions. These processes were also mostly fixed as companies rarely looked forward constant process innovation to keep up with the pace of competitivity. But today, the world’s changing. Processes are being executed across the solution boundaries and even across the company’s boundaries, they may be re-engineered at several phases to match the company’s strategy on the market.

If we take the computer manufacturing industry, the usual process would be “Manufacture the equipment -> ship to dealers -> Select the equipment (customer) -> Pay (customer)“. DELL has drastically changed this process, which earned them a highly competitive advantage at several levels. The process has been changed to “Select the equipment -> Pay -> Manufacture the equipment -> Ship to customer“. At this point, DELL has improved at least on two main points: exit the dealers, reducing the number of  intermediates and they don’t need fully manufactured stocked equipment. Basically computers are stocked in warehouses in a pre-assembled state. Assembling might even be transfered (outsourced) to Supply Chain providers. At this point, they’re having a direct contact with the customer, tightening the relationship, and they’re increasing their profitability (fixed costs reduction).

For solution experts, this has a major impact on the way they usually implement the process. They need to have a complete understanding of the impacts of the re-engineering on their blueprint. How they shift from a data receiver from process step 3 to a data source for step 2.

For this purpose, the experts will require to have a broader knowledge of what they are implementing, how’s their part is being integrated within a wider scope, what happens in every phase and then they should shift into a full understanding of the process end-to-end.

So if you wonder how you can update your skills ? What you should look at ?

I say, forget modules and go end-to-end process: Order to Cash or Procure to Pay. With today’s technology and solution maturity, processes tend to have tighter integration between them. They are not just merely tables and transactions, but there’s a real logic flow orchestrating each step of the process.

Coupled with the Business Process Experts/Champions/Owners, the consultants will seek into bringing a higher value to their customer/company by optimizing the execution of the process at every step with a coherent and comprehensive understanding of the impacts of each action and decision.

In an SOA approach, the isomorphism between the process and the services will lead  to create fine grained components which are then assembled altogether into composite applications. This leads to a tighter integration of components (logical point of view) as a service might as well execute operations in a project and finance systems.

While there might still be confusion among SAP practitioners on the ability to go from a modular perspective to the end-to-end perspective, this change will be driven by the market evolution and the solution architecture anyways. The idea is that rather than being an expert on 10 FI processes while you usually implement 4 of them. The skills evolution roadmap would guide you through the different stages of your process implementation within the other modules/solutions, hence fully leveraging your training and expertise on all areas.

This full fledged knowledge of the process will also provide a new empowerment that will allow experts to drive the innovation to reflect the business requirements or even anticipate them,  as this is where the real value lies.

With the advent of Web 2.0, web applications, thin applications and Software as a Service have lead to a fast development of Rich Internet Applications, in particular the user interface (UI) and usability. Whether they are based on AJAX, Flex or Silverlight, they all have a common purpose: provide an improved user experience through a thin client, at least comparable to fat client’s if no better.

Along the years, many software providers looked forward porting their current business applications to web based platforms, mainly for easing the maintenance, avoiding client deployment. These platforms, mainly based on J2EE technologies, were mostly made of static display, although the content was generated dynamically. On the usability level, users have gone from bad to worse. We all know business software has never been sexy. In addition to that, people now had to deal with constant refresh of pages for every action, increased wait-time while data was submitted to the server, as HTTP is not an optimized protocol for transactional applications.

On the other side, developers had to deal with issues like supporting several platforms (combination of browser/OS), new security aspects on uncontrolled layers, harder user acceptance.

The transition from fat client to thin client has merely been a mess for most software vendors. Reason ? This transition has been mainly technical and product managers have forgotten the main brick: the users.

Any change must under-go a global user acceptance. Especially when it comes to business software, that’s something people will use constantly on a daily basis for their work, you need to make sure to have a wide adoption and make it mainstream. For this purpose, the change must be user-centric.

RIA have the advantage of being naturally user focused. They tend to improve the user experience, allowing a more interactive approach with the web application, unlike HTML.

To the users, RIA comes with its own set of benefits:

• Increase productivity
• Enable an engaging, interactive user experience without page reloads or refreshes
• Provide real-time data management
• Allow users to interactively visualize and manipulate complex data more effectively and easily (drill-down, drag and drop…)
• Assisted inputs (interactive search, predictive typing…)
• Optimized screen layout (reduction of complexity)
• Keep pace with the users expectations. The UI for their business software are now aligned with those of their daily personal apps (E-Mail, Social Networks, Document sharing…)

On the other side, by creating a custom rich front-end, developers can  have a better enablement of the process centric aspect of the application. This becomes even more important when the process goes above a simple application boundaries to be executed onto several platforms.  Screen flows can be designed and organized according to the business process requirements while providing a uniform UI for all the process steps. Screens can be drastically reduced by automating the values of some fields and make them transparent to the users.

With RIA, companies are now able to address most of the users current issues with business software which are mainly:

• It is very complex
• It looks like crap

Through rewrapping their main processes into RIA, companies might increase their user productivity through this mix of process centric (screen flow) and user centric (usability) interface. Some software vendors now tend to understand that and are extending their frameworks to support new technologies that would allow them to enable this into their portals and mashups  (SAP has introduced the support of AJAX and Flash islands).

But just above the technical aspects of the technology, the complete product/project management chain must be educated on the value of these new user interfaces.

Many social media services launch upon a genuine idea. Something most users will need, use, adopt.

They go for a mock-up and raise the required funds in order to complete the project and head for the go-live, after a mid-long beta period.  Due to the Web 2.0 and social media frenzy, most ventures and business angels are willing to take the risk, even though the business model is not entirely defined, going for a “We will find a way to make money from that”. Here lies the biggest issue, either for the start-up owners and their employees, for the investors and even more for the users.

Most of these services start on a freemium model. Means, you don’t have to pay anything to use them. Some of them will rely on advertizing to get some pennies while others will try a true way to monetize the service (selling a service, selling goods, subscription model).

The second half of start-ups will most probably get away with a great revenue model, provided they have a good product and know how to market it. The first half, on the other hand, has to face wild waters.

We see start-ups going dead everyday. Latest of them, being tr.im, which is shutting down on December 31st. 2009. Since Twitter has promoted Bit.ly as the prefered URL shortener, Nambu could scarcely build a user base big enough to justify the time and effort they put in a service, they could barely if not monetize. Yes, the reality behind is just this.  The service is genuine, useful, you’d adopt it, but you’d never pay for it, and you’d certainly wouldn’t want to have more ads in your pages.

So how much trust can you throw into these services ? Could you just go adopting them, putting them in the center of your daily work and hope they find a way to get a healthy revenue and survive ? Some of them might get lucky and get bought by Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft, but most of them will not.

The odds get higher for services building their model around another free service.

Dozens of services have emerged around Twitter. Twitter is useful, twitter is great, twitter has millions of users, but Twitter doesn’t make money. What would happen to all these dozens of companies if suddenly, for an odd reason, Twitter was to shut down ? They’d just go R.I.P  with no other plan-B to support them ? Of you course, you’ll tell me Twitter cannot go down, there’s no way it does, it is so popular, but I’d say, so were Yahoo!, AOL or Second life only a few years ago, and see where all are headed, fighting for survival, mainly through partnerships or shutting down some of their services.

So are social media services reliable ? I would say, they are, but only for those who have a strong revenue model or that are supported by a company that has enough cash flow to allow them to survive. Any other service might be just hazardeous to use, at least, for centric business purposes.

Thinkervine has migrated from its old host OVH to Media Temple.

The migration has been successful but if you notice any issue, please do not hesitate to report it through the contact form. This migration is completely transparent to you and nothing needs to be done on your side.

This new service should behold its promises and provide a sound infrastructure for this blog. Wishing you all to continue to enjoy our content. We are currently working on enhancing your experience by bringing fresh new concepts.

We thank you for your faith to Thinkervine.

With the recent events around the Twitter information leaked by a hacker, the cloud computing security topic has become a most discussed trend on the web.

About six months ago, I have written this post to talk to you about Otherinbox for Gmail. Now, I have been using this service for nearly one year and I would like to give a feedback on my usage over these last twelve months.

For a starter, let me refresh for new comers and those who don’t know OIB what this is. Otherinbox, is fresh start-up, based in Austin (TX) that provides a service to automatically organize your inbox. No need to create filters and rules to keep a decent inbox and avoid a 6 months backlog, Otherinbox filters your e-mail on the basis of the receiving e-mail address. It lets you create a custom domain (<username>.otherinbox.com or your own domain name if you have one) to which you associate your e-mail accounts. This empowers you with the ability to use create on-the-fly addresses when registering to a new service, removing you the strain of creating the addresses before.  This service also comes as a great way to identify who’s spamming you,  hence you don’t need to use that old “no-spam” address we all used to have.

So over the year, Otherinbox has improved on several levels. First thing, as any brand new product, there were few bugs, but where Otherinbox deserves an A+ grade is their dedication and quick response to the users requests, fixing the issues in order to avoid harm and inconvenience to the users.

On the other side, they have been working hard in order to bring several new features:

? Spam filters. Now your e-mails are all scanned and spams are automatically discarded.

? Otherinbox for Gmail: If you’re willing to keep your Gmail account and still use it as a primary account for your contacts, no worries. Otherinbox has come with O4G. This service will scan your new e-mails and it will automatically archive them in your OIB account following built-in rules for recognition and grouping. Nothing is deleted on the Google Mail servers, e-mails are just endorsed with the label “Otherinbox”. Few months laters, the integration with Yahoo! Mail has been provided as well.

Following the same philosophy of autopilot e-mail, they have provided automatic filters to organize mailing lists subscriptions (Google groups, Yahoo groups, Craiglist…).

You e-mails are accessible through a regular ajaxed web interface but you can also have them delivered through RSS on your favorite aggregator.

If you’re willing to use Otherinbox from a fat client or from your mobile, you will have to sign up for a Premium account (20$/year) which will provide you access all your e-mail using IMAP, the Premium version will also allow you to see messages that have been on your inbox for more than 30 days.

Last and not least, Otherinbox technology is now compatible with most browsers on the market including IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

But Otherinbox is not stopping there. They are working hard on bringing new features and improving the experience. The roadmap includes enhanced mobile versions (you may check the iPhone version), coupons and full list of your receipts.

Otherinbox has really helped throughout the year with this powerful on-the-fly email. Either when subscribing to a service, when networking with people, or just when I had to enroll for specific registrations (hotels, premium memberships, clubs, coupons). I didn’t need to think about being spammed anymore or that I would have to manage any unwanted e-mail. The only thing that I was thinking about was being creative when providing the new e-mail address.

Oh and by the way, this is just my personal feedbacks and I am, in no way, affiliated to Otherinbox, but you have any specific questions, you may ask them on Twitter.