Michael Fauscette

Applying social to business

Sometimes words and the baggage those words naturally carry can really get in the way of explaining new ideas. Maybe it's just me, but I think that issue is one of the biggest barriers to the current discussion of social business. I've consistently tried to drive home the concept that social business is about transforming business culture and not about new technology. Unfortunately when I try to drill into the structure of this new culture I've fallen back to my software roots and used enterprise terms that lead people down the wrong path. I realized that clearly this week during my social business track at IDC Directions. We have to come up with a better way to analyze social business and explain it in ways that help people understand where we're going, not where we've been. So to that end, I'm going to move away, at least for now, from software terms like CRM, PLM, ERP, etc. and start to think about a different framework.

Social business touches all areas of a business. Underlying technology will of course be needed to enable the connections and scaleability but the focus is on business functions. New business approaches that incorporate social concepts can impact customers, employees, partners and suppliers. The framework then, is built around these business areas: 1. customer engagement, 2. employee empowerment, 3. partner enablement and 4. supplier engagement. This Prezi fleshes out this framework a little more:

Social business is not "just" about communicating better!

I heard this statement recently from an analyst, "social media for business is really just about communicating better". Huh? Traditional collaboration was about communicating better and you see where that took us...email inboxes overflowing and almost useless, team workspaces that support silo'ed work, IM sucking productivity as bad a phone calls (why does a ringing phone appear to be urgent even when you don't know who it is?)... No sir, social media for business is NOT just about communicating better. Of course part of the problem is trying to use the social media term for what is a much bigger "thing", the social web and all the constructs it has created. I use the term social business to cover the holistic look at social for business, which to me seems like a much better fit. Now if the claim was that social in business is about connecting with people or engaging people more effectively, maybe I'd buy that but not just communicating.

Applying social concepts to business has wide applicability and could touch almost every area in an enterprise. When I think of social business and how we're using the concepts (or could use) in business I see the following:

• Social CRM: the application of social concepts to engage customers more effectively in sales, marketing and customer service. (I could break each area out more, social sales, social marketing, social PR, social customer service, but you get the point).
• Social product design / development: using social concepts to design products that are based on customer needs, wants and desires (ideasourcing) and vetted through the collective knowledge and expertise of a companies' employee resources in a closed loop system that runs from customer input to customer feedback.
• Social employee enablement: enabling a cultural shift in the overall employee community by applying social concepts to employee policies, processes and tools. This could include: a) socialytic apps, b) enhanced user experience for enterprise apps, c) user generated content for employee, customer, and partner training, d) enterprise "YouTube", e) internal microblogging, f) employee network, g) ad hoc process enablement, h) open access to, search to find and tools to update, rate and contribute to enterprise content (with tagging, folksnomy, etc), i) social human resources (at some point I'll expand on this, but at a minimum self-managed profiles but could go as far as socially managed compensation)...
• Social partner management: I suppose we'd call this social PRM, applying social concepts to partner programs and changing the way we interact with the partner ecosystem. This could start with partner communities but could extend to self-managed programs, open content development, etc.
• Social supply chain: Supplier networks, as a concept are not new but through the application of social concepts we could extend that and create supplier communities as well as tie the supplier into the social product design / development process.

I've purposefully tried to stay away from vendors and specific tools as much as possible. Focus needs to be on the business transformation not on the technology. What do you think, are there other areas in business where social concepts can be effectively applied?

  

The New "BYO" workforce

  No I'm not suggesting that you run out and buy a six pack (although if you want to go crack one open while you read this, feel free). It strikes me that on top of the behavioral changes and new habits of interaction that the social web has created there is another more fundamental change in behavior...we're simply just not as tolerant as we used to be when it comes to technology. Maybe a big part of this is the effect of the empowerment that comes to the individual through the social web. As we have become more focused on the people and less on the technology (people as the platform) the tools have grown more user friendly and powerful in their simplicity. We're used to this in all of our non-work online experiences and even carry it over to our devices (iPhones, MacBooks, etc.).

There are so many useful tools available online for free or almost free these days and they are all built with this new simple user experience paradigm in mind. Somewhere along the way employees started their own silent revolt at work. Instead of obeying the IT corporate rules they started going around IT to solve their business problems in the most expeditious and effective way when the corporate standard wasn't up to their expectations and needs. Need to collaborate on a doc, spreadsheet or presentation, there's Google Doc's, Zoho, etc. Need a private team room that is accessible from any internet connected device (read no VPN, firewall, etc.) to share files and have discussions, there's Google Groups, LinkedIn Groups, etc. Want to form an open community around a topic, again Google Groups, Yahoo Groups, LinkedIn Groups...lot's of choices. Don't like the corporate issues Blackberry, buy your own iPhone (of course no guarantee you'll be able to get corp email on it, some companies allow, some don't...which is sadly why I'm still carrying 2 devices). I see this happening in other ways as well, I don't like the laptop the company provides, I use my own; I don't like Powerpoint I use Keynote or Prezi...the list is endless. The issue is probably more obvious in social tools, the enterprise doesn't provide a way to network and communicate in other-than-email ways (or corporate IM) so the employees connect on Facebook, use Twitter, IM on Facebook or gchat, post videos on YouTube and pictures on Flickr...you get the point.

It would be interesting to see just how much corporate IP that the companies think are securely tucked away behind the firewall are actually in Google Docs (not to pick on google). I often refer to the three types of social models I see in businesses today: 1. the social denyer,2. the accidental socialite and 3. the socially aware. According to a recent IDC survey 57% of the respondents use social media for business purposes at least once a week, 37% use both corporate and consumer tools for business and 15% reported (read that as admitted) using a consumer social tool instead of the corporate sponsored tool because of ease of use (simple user interface), familiarity from personal use, and low cost. The accidental socialite group of businesses are growing based on everything I'm seeing and is being fueled by this "BYO" culture. And interestingly enough this is not a generation movement. I hear this a lot," oh it's just the kids that get and use social media"...that's simply not true. In fact in our social business survey referenced above IT/Ops and Executives were by far the most likely to use social tools (both consumer and corporate sponsored). In other data I reviewed, the largest age group across all social sites was the 35-44 year olds (25%) with the next closest group the 45-54 (19%). We have to come up with new corporate policies, new social policies and even new ways to interact with traditional enterprise systems if we are going to bring the BYO culture back into the fold...if that's even what we want to do. IT wants control but the more control that is exercised the more likely the BYO workforce will work around the controls. The happy medium in social business, I think, will come as we see more enterprise grade social tools that can meet corporate objectives (although we probably need to think about these objectives in light of what we have learned about the social web) and at the same time enable the experience that the employees are getting from the social tools they use in their personal lives.

#scrmsummit

Last week in I joined a group of social CRM experts and representatives from 14 software vendors for a 2 day social CRM summit. The event, led by noted CRM author, blogger and consultant Paul Greenberg and BPT Partners, was held in Herndon, VA (see the pic above, taken from the Westin Dulles during the snow storm that kept most of us there an extra day or so). The event generated some great discussions and networking opportunities. One of the biggest take aways for me is that SCRM is still on the bleeding edge new zone and there are some really smart people that are defining and refining it on an almost daily basis. I also believe that it's on the edge of trendy and is starting to attract some people around the edges that are trying to jump on the band wagon and yet, are not "experts" in CRM at all. I won't go through my whole social business speech again, but I do want to emphasize again that social business and SCRM are not social media or social networking. They are not defined by the consumer tools like Twitter and Facebook either. Social Biz and SCRM are about changing corporate culture and about relationships, IMHO. I also am joining Paul in the decision to stop trying to define and debate the definition of SCRM...it's time to do. OK, enough of that, on with today's point. There are some excellent write ups already published (CRM Strategies Blog and Brent's Social CRM Blog) on the summit so I won't try to recount the whole event, but instead I think I'll just hit on a few points that I think are worth repeating:

• CRM taught companies how to "manage" customer relationships, SCRM admits that companies cannot manage customer relationships...customers own their relationship with the company
• Web 2.0 empowered the individual. The world is becoming individual / customer centric and this often breaks current business logic.
• Web 2.0 has taught us very different behaviors, expectations and ways of interacting. Customer's translate these new behaviors into the expectation of near real-time interactions with companies. They want the experience to mimic other online interactions and want the experience to be personalized and delivered up "when, where and how" they want.
• The social customer wants a "self-managed' experience and expects the company to provide the plumbing.
• Customer centricity: the conversation is controlled by the customer.
• SCRM moves the point from management to engagement.
• The old saying of "like me good" not like me bad" is even more important in today's online world. Trust filtering is an important key to building trust. Video could add quite a bit to the "trust factor", visual cues are still very powerful
• SCRM is an extension of traditional CRM not a replacement. The underlying data is important, especially when tied to new sources of social data and coupled with socialytics.
• People are the new platform (yes, I've written about it before, but it applies to all people in a social biz, customers, employees, partners, suppliers...) The focus is not on technology or process anymore, it's on people.
• Make the customer a part of your business (duh). Think "mom and pop" business from main street USA only at scale.
• The goal is customer engagement and engagement comes from providing experiences to the customer. Create an experience for your customer, don't just "sell" them something...the strength is in emotions and emotional ties.
• Social business is a new business model that incorporates a company philosophy and culture of transparency and honest relationships with employees, customers and partners.
• Stop focusing inward... our web sites are designed for us, customer service is designed for the company (it is CUSTOMER service after all), we sell what we have not what the customer wants... focus on the people.

This is only a small list of the excellent topics we discussed last week, take a look at the other posts to see more details. Here's another post that incorporates some of the topics from last week from Mitch Lieberman. You might also want to check out Michael Krigsman's ZDNet blog that incorporates a video interview that Michael conducted with me and Forrester analyst Dr Natalie Petouhoff talking about SCRM and social business that we recorded last week at the summit.

Some Predictions for 2010

2009 is thankfully behind us and its time to turn our attention to 2010 in ernest. Every year at this time teams of analysts all over IDC get together and produce top ten predictions documents in their coverage areas. My group, Software Business Solutions is no exception, we're putting the finishing touches on our document this weekend. I have a joint breakfast briefing with Henry Morris and Steve Hendrick this Tuesday, 1/26 to highlight predictions from the 3 major WW IDC software groups. Contributing to the predictions from my group: Mary Wardley, Albert Pang, Amy Konary, Robert Mahowald, Sanjeev Pal, Darren Bibby, Steve White, Virginia Agee, Mira Perry and Caroline Dangson.

I'm not going to share the whole document in this post, if you want that you'll have to check it out on the IDC site (should be up in a week or so), but I do want to share the predictions that we came up with this year. From a trends perspective the predictions theme is the "new normal" and they fell into a few buckets; social business, mobile, next gen apps / cloud and lasting change. Here are our predictions:

1. The social business movement gains momentum through the cultural shift that is enabled by social enabled applications that are formed from the intersection of collaboration, content, search, communities, CRM and the current web 2.0 tools like blogs, wiki’s, microblogs, etc. with 50%+ of the Fortune 500 initiating social business projects this year.

2. Software vendors, recognizing that "one size does not fit all" with partner programs, will move to an a-la-carte benefit structure versus a long list of perks with diluted value.

3. The great divide will come to an end between horizontal and vertical applications for the enterprise.

4. As a fundamental part of the Social Business transformation businesses shift their focus from technology and process to people, who in effect become the new enterprise platform.

5. Cloud infrastructure computing moves squarely into the mainstream as a significant number of the Fortune 1000 companies adopt the utility computing model demonstrated by moving a portion of their “sandbox” apps into production on public clouds.

6. In response to a productivity spike, VARs, SIs and ISVs will turn in force to contracting (virtual staffing) and partnering. Vendor programs will adapt to support these new models.

7. "There's an app for that": Mobile becomes the new enterprise desktop with more than 50% of US workers accessing applications via a mobile device.

8. The 'new normal' will give rise to increased end-user buying power causing extreme pressure on existing vendors to mold offerings and giving opportunity to aggressive suppliers.

9. A software industry shift toward subscription models will result in a nearly $7B decline in WW new license revenues in 2010.

10. Cloudsourcing becomes a major alternative for companies looking to outsource non-core business processes (software-in-a-service).

So there you have it, what other predictions did we miss for enterprise applications and their vendors and partners?

Update on the "local" wars

A few weeks ago I wrote a post on Google's (now failed) attempt to buy Yelp. In that post I pointed out a couple of reasons why I thought Yelp was falling behind services like FourSquare, Gowalla, etc. There were a few things that I thought made the newer services "better", context aware location based check-in that can be shared with your network on Facebook, Twitter, etc., the ability to tie your Yelp community to your existing community for the added trust that accompanies your established network and augmented reality. I talked about reaching local markets, something that Google and many others find very appealing and Yelp has done quite well, in this post on hyper-local. This last weekend Yelp announced the addition of a few new features on its iPhone app that completely closed the gap on the other apps that I had mentioned. Specifically Yelp added:

• A friend finder feature that let's you find your Facebook friends and friends in your iPhone address book. In effect tying Yelp to your trust networks.
• Check-ins. Now you can broadcast your location to your friends and share tips, info, etc. on Yelp, Facebook and Twitter. It includes push notifications and the ability to show check-ins as well as find near-by friends who have check-in. You can also attain "regular" status for businesses you visit regularly.
• Share via Facebook Connect and Twitter
• Updates to the augmented reality feature, Monocle, that adds check-ins and a map view to the reviews already available.
• Access to your Yelp profile from the iPhone.

All-in-all a very strong move by Yelp to address the issues that were starting to make them somewhat dated in the mobile local apps arena. I've just started using the new features so I'll update this after I have a higher comfort level with them.

Hyper-connected

I woke up this morning and did what I do most mornings, reached for my iPhone sitting next to my bed to start catching up on what I missed while I was sleeping. Let's see, a few Twitter DM's (handily sent to SMS) to answer, a few Facebook comments (SMS again) and mail, a couple of txt messages that didn't wake me up, notifications from Gowalla and FourSquare, a txt from Ribbit of a voice mail I missed last night...stumble into the kitchen for a Monster drink and then sit down at the MacBook to give Twitter a better look, check in on Facebook and flip through Netnewswire for interesting info to read and post to Twitter, work on a blog post idea, a quick check of email (ugh, a couple of hundred piled up since yesterday) and the day's started. After some breakfast I have to take my daughters to Barnes and Noble (I can't convince them to switch to a Kindle, my preferred always connected reading device) so throw iPhone in 1 pocket, Blackberry in the other...OK, yes I'm an extreme case but lets face it, more and more, we're connected to our networks all the time. In a recent IDC survey 40.3% of respondents reported using a smart phone at least 2 times per workday to connect to the Internet (source IDC Nov 2009, n=4710, US based). Two years ago in another US based survey of the ~32% of respondents that used the Internet on a mobile device they spent an average of 45 hours per week online, 38 stationary and 7 hours per week on the mobile (n=3176) (and I'm sure that number has gone up since 2008). According to Neilsen Online in 2008 roughly 72.5% of the total US population used the Internet (or 220,141,969 people) increasing to 74.1% in 2009 (227,719,000 people). That would make mobile users 70,445,430 people in 2008 and 91,770, 757 people in 2009. With the expansion of wifi, especially of free wifi, which is now getting very available even at 30K feet as more and more airlines add support, and the ability to connect extends almost everywhere.

As the general population becomes more mobile, as we become more and more connected through the social web and as the lines between business and personal get blurrier are we moving to a place where we are in fact, always connected. "Always" is relative of course, I mean, people do still disconnect at times, even the most connected of us run away for a short periods. It seems to me though, that the disconnected time gets less and less. Now I know that I'm affected but what I call the "edges" effect...people who live on the edges of the US in general, seem to be early adopters of technology (and no, I have no scientific or survey data to support this theory, just a lot of years observing that behavior). I remember during the Internet bubble using Webvan. I loved Webvan, you ordered groceries online and they showed up at your house; you could even save the shopping list and just reorder it each week (or whatever period you wanted)...fantastic really. Kozmo.com was another great one, you ordered just about anything from them and they'd deliver...videos, sandwiches, whatever you wanted. Order and their army of moped enabled delivery people mobilized to procure and deliver! I remember trying to explain these to friends and relatives in other parts of the country and mostly all I got were blank stares...I think my mom believed it was some sort of plot to get her to eat old produce or something. Lesson learned, what sounds good in San Francisco may not sound that way to the middle of the US. I've learned to use that as a sort of litmus of start up ideas, "what would they say about the idea in Cleveland, Kansas City or some other middle of the country city", just to see if its something that has a prayer of getting to any sort of widespread adoption.

Anyway, I'm rambling, back to the topic of hyper-connectivity. Individually we are more and more connected, both to the Internet and through the internet / social web to each other. That connectivity moves easily over to the business world. Businesses are interconnected to supply chain, partners, employees, customers and even competitors. This interdependence or ecosystem, has very different modes of interaction than independent people, businesses, etc. Independent organizations focus internally, interdependent organizations must focus externally. This is one of the fundamental changes that are creeping into businesses today and part of the foundation of the transition to a social business. Hyper-connectivity opens us up to more, different and better ways of interacting and collaborating. It also can strain old paradigms and stress old modes of interaction (maybe that falls in the "progress has its price" bucket). For me, adjusting to hyper-connectivity has not really required any effort but I suppose some of us will find the price too high.

Hyper-local

The recent rumors around Google acquiring Yelp (which of course have subsequently fallen through) and my recent use of several location based apps like FourSquare and EveryBlock caused me to start thinking about the emerging re-focus on local business. I think that several technologies have finally matured enough to have a real impact for local businesses to effectively reach potential customers in new and compelling ways. Local businesses, or as we like to refer to them, the "long tail", are plentiful, diverse and difficult to reach. SW companies intuitively know that there's money in that long tail, but few have successfully managed to extract any of it. I'm specifically talking about the "small" in the small and medium business market. Certainly Microsoft, Sage, Intuit and others have managed to build solid businesses in the medium business space. And I guess Intuit's QuickBooks product line is the standard in small bookkeeping. Where it gets sticky (and frankly, where the most opportunity lies) is in helping local businesses attract and keep customers. Google would love to come up with a way to reach these businesses and get them into the fold. So far, at least from an Internet perspective, Yelp is the only company that has made any progress to speak of (and obviously the reason Google was interested in acquiring Yelp).

Yelp's approach is interesting as it combines community with crowdsourcing and user generated content to gain influence which it can then leverage to sell ads. The real asset then is the legions of loyal reviewers that regularly generate content on the site. Those reviewers vie for prestige and recognition in the community and the ones that are successful get to attend "exclusive" Yelp events in addition to the recognition of the community. To monetize the site Yelp has put local account reps in place to sell ads. There's quite a bit of "pounding the pavement" in the model but it is proving effective.

What did people do before Yelp, used the Yellow Pages I guess. At least the Yellow Pages were the last successful business model for reaching and engaging these small, local businesses. There were some attempts to translate the Yellow Pages to the online world, most notably Yahoo and even AT&T but thankfully they really haven't gained much influence. I suppose there are still people and communities of people that use the print or online yellow pages but it seems like its going the same way as print media. Anyway, where is this all going? Several trends, I think, will start impacting hyper-local this year, mobile, context aware apps (most notably location awareness), and the social web. Yelp leverages social web of course and does have a mobile app that's location aware already. I wonder though, will apps like FourSquare, with its ability to serve up location specific offers and specials, start to erode some of Yelp's local clout? The game portion of FourSquare (and Gowalla as well) does seem to be drawing more people into participating and if the momentum continues could offer local businesses a very targeted way to reach prospective customers.

There are other approaches that could help reach into hyper-local that combine context awareness with augmented reality and even user generated content. Apps like Wikitude and cyclopedia, for example could make a run at local advertising and embed them into their AR features. GraffitiGeo could also be a contender in this space, as it adds in user generated location specific "notes" or Graffiti and crowdsourcing votes for or against local businesses. And EveryBlock, which is owned by MSNBC, is another interesting play in the hyper-local online news and information aggregation space. Currently EveryBlock ha Google Ads on the site, but you have to think that they could garner some share if the site continues to attract new users. And what about google, will they make their own play to try and capture some of the new hyper-local ad revenue?

Top Tech Disruptors of the 2000's

Every decade seems to carry a set of defining themes in tech. For the 1990's it was the move to client / server, the emergence of the transaction web and the frenzy to "solve" the Y2K threat (and perhaps the rise of the Internet bubble). The 2000's started with a fizzle as the world realized that the Y2K "threat" was a non-event and continued with a loud pop as the Internet "bubble" burst. Beyond that somewhat inauspicious beginnings though, we had an active and productive decade in tech with many disruptors and advances that set up the next decade as one that will see dramatic change in tech.

So what are the key developments and disruptions from the last decade? Here are, IMHO, the most important developments of the last decade:

1. Mobile: The 2000's will be known as the decade that put the Internet in our pockets. Apple, with its introduction of the iPhone and the apps store changed everything. Yes there were so called "smart phones" before the iPhone but they were a shadow of the power that Apple put in our hands with the first (and arguably still the best) mobile computing platform. Mobile is the key that opened or at least accelerated many of the other disruptions in the 2000's.

2. Cloud: We opened the decade with the applications service provider (ASP) or hosted business model starting to make small (very small) inroads against on premise apps and we leave the decade with full blown concept called cloud computing disrupting the software world. Salesforce.com led the charge first in the apps market and then breaking ground again in the platform as a service (PaaS) market with its Force.com platform. Cloud computing has broken out into 3 distinct "layers", cloud apps (like Salesforce.com's Sales Cloud and Service Cloud), PaaS (Force.com and Netsuite's Suitecloud for example) and cloud infrastructure (Amazon EC2, Rackspace, etc.). A 4th layer started to emerge in 2009, Cloudsourcing (I wrote about it here), or software in a service that combines business process outsourcing and cloud apps into a single offering. I believe we will see a lot more from cloudsourcing offerings in 2010. I could spend a lot of time predicting where I think the cloud is moving as we step into 2010, but I'll save that for the upcoming predictions post.

3. Social Web: This last decade will be remembered as the time that the social web grew up. It did have roots in the late 90's of course, but the move from the transaction web to the social web happened during the 2000's as blogging matured as a media form, social networking redefined on line relationships, and microblogging set a new standard for real time information sharing. The social web has proven to be transgenerational and transformative on the consumer side. For business we started with enterprise 2.0, which often focused more on internal enterprise processes, social media, which manifest the use of web 2.0 tools for outbound business (like Twitter, blogging, etc.), social CRM and finally, as we leave the 2000's, the more holistic social business movement. Social business starts to combine all of these different movements into an internal and external business strategy to transform the way people interact. One other concept should be mentioned in this context, in fact I almost made it its own separate disruption, collective intelligence. So much of the value in the social web for business comes from the application of the concept of collective intelligence to solving business problems and deciding which products or services to build / sell.

4. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA): A few years ago...actually for a good part of the last decade, SW vendors talked about SOA. First vendors released apps that were SOA "enabled" and now we're seeing the release of "native" SOA apps across the next few years. SOA is important but I do think that some vendors over-played the SOA card where customers were concerned. Frankly I'm not so sure how much customers cared about SOA, they certainly cared about the results, easier integration and in a world that is increasingly seeing IT departments with apps both on premise and in the cloud integration is an even higher priority. To me buying an app with SOA is like buying a house with modern, up to code plumbing; I'd certainly care if it wasn't there or didn't work, but its not a factor in why I would buy the house.

5. Context aware apps: Building apps that react appropriately to the real-time context of their use is a concept that we've talked about for quite a few years. Over the last few years (especially the last 2 years) we've started to see good examples of this concept in software and devices. Probably the most prevalent example is in mobility where augmented reality apps are making some headway in using location to provide a variety of information ranging from user generated tags and reviews of restaurants, coffee shops, bars and clubs to tour guide-like information on local landmarks (I discuss this more in this post). Smart devices that combine SW and HW to provide contextual information are also starting to become available (Fedex SenseAware, for example). There are other enterprise examples as well, things like analytics that provide relevant information to users based on who is using the app (role) and what specific function they are performing.

6. Influence: OK, influence isn't a technology disruption, but instead it was significantly disrupted by technology over the last decade. The social web has caused a huge shift in the way we look at influence in almost all industries. Since I'm in the technology influence business it's easy for me to see just how broad and deep this disruption is causing change. The analyst business is certainly feeling the impact of this disruption and the changing channels and models that accompany it. Content used to be where a great deal of the value was for tech analysts firms, for example, but because of the changes content is now becoming something that is available in ever increasing quantities for free. This change alone has caused a massive ripple in media, especially print. Don't get me wrong, content is still important, its just not the point of value, instead the influence itself is the point of value. Taking this further, content establishes influence and influence and content establish credibility. Companies will pay for credibility in the form of consulting for example. Blogs, microblogs (Twitter), online videos, podcasts and social networks are increasingly the center of building / increasing influence.

7. Real-time: The web is becoming real-time through channels like Twitter and search is following this trend (see this post). Today people look to the web for breaking news and real-time information sharing (conversations). This has all sorts of implications for traditional media and for all consumers of information. The evolution of real-time search fuels this shift and will make the web both the channel and the source for real-time information gathering.

8. Connectedness / people as the platform: The last decade has seen the start of a shift in focus in the enterprise from technology to people. As people become the platform technology becomes the enabler for this process. Mobile combined with our always on culture is accelerating the shift both personally and in the enterprise.

9. Consolidation in tech: The last decade was in many ways defined by the massive consolidation across the tech vendor landscape. Many of the major brands of the 1990's are no longer independent companies but instead part of the remaining few mega-tech vendors. Oracle of course led this movement with something like 60 acquisitions in 5 years but many of the other mega-vendors did major acquisitions as well. Multi-brand product portfolios, something seen often in other industries, has become a very viable and profitable business model in tech. Here are two posts that talk more about the impact of this new landscape: 1 and 2

Well that's my list. Now some may ask why Google didn't make the list. I debated this with myself quite a bit. I do think that Google has the potential to be a disruptor in the enterprise but this list is about disruptions that have already started and I just don't see Google's influence as that strong in the enterprise yet. Certainly they're the powerhouse in search and I believe that they have the potential to be a powerhouse in mobile with Android. The other things they're working on, including Google Apps, Wave, etc. are all interesting but I still think we're at the wait and see point. Come back and check this list in another 10 years, maybe Google is a major disruption by then...

What I've discovered about Twitter

Over the last weekend I noticed a Tweet from analyst colleague Esteban Kolsky (@ekolsky) about a interesting project. The idea, dubbed #MonTwit, is to get a group of blogger / analysts to write about the same topic on the same day (today, to be exact). I love the idea and of course I'm a big fan of Twitter so I figured I'd join in.

I joined Twitter in June of 2008, somewhat late to the party in reality but I was experimenting with several types of social media at the time and got around to Twitter in June. There were only a few IDC analysts on Twitter back them and most of them were not that active. I went through the standard use cycle (at least from what I've seen); for the first month or so I was a Twitter voyeur (or as some people say a Twitter lurker) and mostly observed. Once I started to get the basic rhythm down I went into stage 2, the "ham sandwich" stage where the mundane was supposed to somehow be interesting. In fairness I also started sharing some of what I was working on and who I was talking to and over time I evolved out of the mundane and started to develop my own style and use cases. Getting followers was very slow going at first until I decided to just go out and find people in my industry and follow them. I stumbled across Carter Lusher (@carterlusher) from SageCircle (actually he follow me, he's great at finding analysts on Twitter) and realized he followed a lot of the people I was interested in so I used his list as a good start at my expansion. This was 3 or 4 months into the experiment and I think that was really when I found my own use cases and felt like I understood "Twitter etiquette". Most importantly I started to recognize that it was a conversation and that the more you gave into the community the more you got back.

Once I was over around 500 followers I realized that I couldn't stay on top of the noise through the Twitter web client so I asked my Twitter community for advice and started trying different desktop and iPhone clients. For quite a while I used Tweetdeck on my MacBook but earlier this year I switched to Seesmic Desktop, which I still use today. The key for the desktop for me is a strong ability to segment my community into groups so that I can get what I need when I need it. I also like the support for Twitter lists and the Facebook integration. On my iPhone I use several clients, mostly Tweetdeck and Tweetie 2 presently. On my Blackberry I like Seesmic for BB.

I am often asked how I use Twitter and what benefit do I get from that use from people who are not on Twitter or who have not used it for any length of time. One of the first discoveries for me was that you really can't understand Twitter until you use it for awhile. It's like most social networks, immersion is really the only way to gain that understanding. I use Twitter for: 1. sharing information (relevant links, live Tweeting events, interesting things I learn from clients and end users, what I'm working on as well as post on this blog), 2. real-time breaking news, 3. information gathering (especially useful to follow events to which I am unable to attend), 4. short, quick data trending (ask a question, get lot's of relevant answers), 5. "meeting" people in my industry, networking, 6. communication (for me, much more effective for real-time comms than email, but then I hate email), and 7. conversations. One of my favorite fallouts of my involvement in Twitter has been the Tweetups and the people I've transitioned from just a Twitter connection to a real, face-to-face connection. I've met some very interesting people and connect with many of them both here in San Francisco and when I visit other cities. The community grows all the time and more and more I am able to connect on and off line with some great people.

Twitter is definitely an acquired taste and everyone defines their own use cases. That's one of the great things about it, you can make it what you want...be involved a little or a lot, it's your choice. The confined nature of the Tweet keeps things direct and clear for me. A day never goes by that I don't learn something from Twitter, so for me, that's real value. The more you put in, the more you get out...