Tag eBusiness & Web 2.0

Entries 6 Total

Being the Adult in the Room for Social Media Initiatives

Jul 6, ’09 11:51 AM

The Social Media hype cycle seems to have leveled off a bit over last few months, and we are seeing more examples of large organizations using these new tools and sharing their successes and lessons learned. The promise of social media for business includes real-time customer feedback, trend identification, additional brand loyalty, and a richer relationship with customers.

A small sampling of recent examples include:

  • A passenger on Virgin America doesn’t get his meal, tweets about it, and the airline is quick enough in its monitoring that it can contact the flight crew and get him a meal before the flight ends
  • Comcast, a member of an industry not known for terrific customer service, has a team of people monitoring the web and attempting to provide instant responses to those with a complaint, or considering moving to another provider
  • TI builds a community portal for its engineers to directly connect with external customers (also engineers) and share best practices, bypassing the standard help desk interface
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The Need For Innovation In Corporate Web Site Search

Jun 24, ’09 10:18 PM

As IT leaders we often see opportunities for innovation in the technology assets developed and managed within our organizations. Such is the case for the following proposition around corporate web site search, which may be relevant considering the recent introductions of Bing, WolframAlpha and the word “semantic” back in the news again.

The magnitude of the Internet’s success is now matched by user frustration in sifting through endless unstructured web sites and billions of web pages for immediately relevant information. Whether it’s a large company site or a small political Blog, users are presented with a rising sea of information and are increasingly challenged to get to a specific answer or fact.

The large general-purpose search engines have been of significant benefit for several years, in that they could find a million “needles” in the Internet “haystack” in less than a second. The problem is, eventually consumers will want to stop wading through all those needles and get a relevant answer back. The user will expect to interact with a system that can better understand the information and meaning contained in those millions of web pages. Some believe the days of keyword searches presenting millions of results back to a consumer are numbered.

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IT Leaders Need a Presence on the Web

Apr 9, ’09 12:58 PM

Whether you are firmly established in your corporate IT leadership position, in transition between opportunities or seeking business as a independent consultant, it may soon be an expectation that you have some kind of “footprint” on the web, be it original content, presentations, or searchable commentary for your area of expertise.

It has become common practice to search for, and expect to see “extra curricular” web content and activities for IT developers/architects that are applying for positions (contribution to open source projects, blogs, news aggregators, etc.) Shouldn’t we expect the same to occur for IT management: the sharing of leadership philosophies, challenges overcome, and individual learnings?  Could this investment of time be the differentiator for IT executives in a challenging job market, or do you see it as a potential risk?

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