Archive for the ‘Vision’ Category

The future of social media - social business in social comfort zones

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

The vast availability of social media and its matureness is allowing us to think of Web 3.0 instead of Web 2.0. It’s time for more personal and relevant offers instead of bulk offers. Morgan Stanley asked a 15yr old intern to tell them how teenagers are using media: http://media.ft.com/cms/c3852b2e-6f9a-11de-bfc5-00144feabdc0.pdf .

A clear message: “Most teenagers enjoy and support viral marketing, as it often creates humorous and interesting content. Teenagers see adverts on websites (popups, banner ads) as extremely annoying and pointless, as they have never paid any attention to them and they are portrayed in such a negative light that no one follows them’

The next generation is expecting us to be more ’social’ and ‘personal’ with them. So no more ‘come to our website’ … instead ‘come to me and make me an offer I can’t refuse’.

This is the reason that I find the social media marketing method described on this blog: http://socialnetworkinglifestyle.com/blog/there-is-a-method-to-the-social-media-marketing-madness/ not really ’social’ as it tells marketeers to think that users still have to come to their website for the offering that is available for anyone.

A social media marketing model that I dont believe - its NOT SOCIAL!

A social media marketing model that I don't believe - it's NOT SOCIAL!

Social commerce / business is more about a personal dialogue with offers that are so relevant that users feel special. Web 3.0 is about using all the Web 2.0 data, messages, chatter etc. to make business run smarter (=more personal and relevant). Companies that will achieve this will get to a deeper level of communication with their relations, a domain where you’re found before you’re searched for.

To achieve this another model needs to be created, one that is aimed at long durable social relationships instead of one that is focused on conversion. After finalizing our innovation process with the innovation consultants of CIM - paid with Dutch Innovation subsidies  :) - we’ve established such a model for social media marketing around our Chameleon technology:

SOCIAL media marketing is about durable relationships and relevant offerings - be found before you're searched for

SOCIAL media marketing is about durable relationships and relevant offerings - be found before you're searched for

Although we’re a technology company, I believe in the basic concept of marketing - creating a durable relationship. So many marketing gurus talk about higher conversion, personal branding - I believe they’re making it just to difficult for their followers. An IT statement: KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid. As a technology company we strongly feel we can deliver the tools and techniques required for this higher level of marketing.

So marketeers, just look at yourself, your family and friends - how would you like to be adressed by companies that try to sell you something off line? Does this feel familliair?

  • Don’t annoy me with those standard banners, ads and leaflets!
  • Why don’t they have what I want?
  • Why do I have to search for it?
  • Here they come again, just when I don’t need it.

Marketeers, adjust your online campaigns to something more durable and valuable - the opposite of advertizing on Google! Do you really want to be like bankers that focus on the immediate gain? What is the lesson we all want them to learn? So go and brainstorm with our team about durable relationships and trust that a better conversion will follow. Just compare Love with the red light district in Amsterdam - what do marketeers prefer? Well, if I have to believe Forrester reasearch …

According to Forrester only 6% of online marketing budget is spent into social media marketing - the only alternative to invest into durable relationship online

According to Forrester only 6% of online marketing budget is spent into social media marketing - the only alternative to invest into durable relationship online

Disclaimer: I’m not a marketing guru, I’m just trying to use the web to improve my services to my customers - my ideas are free for anyone to use . Don’t sue me or my company if your boss doesn’t have the patience for longterm results and fires you for wanting something more durable with better longterm results.
Even after you’ve reminded him that the bankers  that caused us all to lose X.000.000.000.000 Euros/Dollars. (that’s X.000 for every person on this planet - many don’t even have it)

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Posted in Chameleon, Componence, Vision by Ha Vo | 9 Comments »

Mashup example - LastFM in Facebook with Google Maps & Amazon

Saturday, April 4th, 2009

The first Componence mashup example for the world to see

At last - Componence has achieved a major goal at the end of this first quarter! Our first example mashup is ready! It has been a about a month ago when we began to work on the LastFM - Facebook mashup. And after a month, with approximately 500 - 600 hours of work, we’ve put it to a rest. The result:

  • Different demonstrations to music producers showed interest, the producer of The Dream might be interested.
  • Mubito probably will do a Proof of Concept with us in May - we should add their APIs to it.
  • A demo of our new Chameleon technology that I can easily use & show in our sales. The goal from last summer was to have this at the end of Q1.

The background of this mashup
The idea for this mashup was triggered by this e-mail response of Yannick De Rechapt, CTO of Mubito:

” What type of applications do you want to expose into the communities?
- Basically expose content such as, audio, video, member data, feeds, shop widgets with search based on our catalogues + single cart etc… this is a non exhaustive list.

What kind of communities are you thinking about?
- Again I don’t have an exhaustive list but : flicker, myspace, imeem, lastfm, facebook and so and so”

Although they had switched their WLP platform to a PHP platform, Yannick was keen about our Chameleon technology, that would allow him to make widgets to be posted to different social networks. We just took it a little bit further …

Not enough real data
Before I want to tell about what was mixed & matched, here is a list of everything that is hard coded due to lack of time / real data:

News not yet implemented

News not yet implemented - it can be a combination of different news sources and Twitter

Photos & Videos - no reliable real source - can be user generated content or Webservices

Photos & Videos - no reliable real source - can be user generated content or Webservices

The mashup ingredients
The main source of the mashup is LastFM, but the mix might make it more valuable for end users.

  • LastFM
    • User preferences / top artists, artist data, event data
  • Google Maps
    • Allowing us to show the events in a map
  • Amazon
    • Allowing us to connect e-commerce to the app

Why Facebook as first choice?
The combination above has been implemented in a Facebook look & feel for the following reasons:

But if this continues into a real project, of course the app would also be available in other communities.

Value for potential business?
Although we don’t know the music industry is not our own comfort zone, I do think this kind of application can help them to deal better with their pains:

  • Revenues - due to illegal downloads - their revenues are continuously under pressure
    • The theory is that if the mashup is valuable enough, the user can take it along into their comfort zone (community, desktop, mobile). And then probably we might get fans to buy albums / merchandise more easily. From once a year to twice a year can already be a huge increase in revenues.
  • Better cost / benefits
    • An insider told me that the music industry are like dinosaurs, they’re so far behind on technology. Just look at the websites of most artists, most of them just don’t really appeal for engagement / interaction with endusers. A mashup can incorporate many popular, of course Twitter on top, webplatforms that are already favorites for user generated content (YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, blogs). If there is better interaction, there are more chances there are sales.
  • Easier way to engage and keep fans happy
    • By being in their comfort zone, artists can consider giving out special freebies to fans who have this app in their profile. Just think of live webcam feeds of concerts? Or free downloads of the latest single within the first 24 hours? Or a sweepstake contest with the ultimate prize being a private appearance.
  • New business model - different subscriptions
    • Silver, Gold, Platinum? With maybe just $1-$3 dollars a month, you can get access to more cool features. With the ultimate privileges like access to special webcam chats, or another free download, or the details to secret appearances or even invites to hangout with the artist.
  • More prolonged return for investments
    • For any artist - starter or already a star - eventually millions is put into marketing. How much return is their in an ad in a magazine or a billboard? How the return of those investments be prolonged? I believe that such offline promotions can easily be connected to the online Fanbase.
    • I think if a fan spends $50 for a single concert and merchandising, by giving discount coupons at the concert to the online shop and special access codes to behind the scenes reports, we might get the fan to spend another $20 online in the week after the concert. And if we’re really good, the fan will make use of the special discount on the Gold membership, that can last for years.
    • Personally I think a really cool mashup would cost between $50.000 - $100.000. With 10.000 fans - online sales between $5-$10 per fan would already be enough. But what if there are 25.000 or 100.000 fans?

Standard Chameleon panels ready
With this mashup we already have different panels that can be easily reused for our other mashup projects:

  • Check login with LastFM
  • Retrieve & show favorite artists from LastFM
  • Retrieve & show Events list from 1 artist from LastFM
  • Retrieve & show Details of 1 event from 1 artist from LastFM
  • Search & show results of artists from LastFM
  • GoogleMaps to show events from LastFM
  • List of related downloads from Amazon

We might come up with cooler names for the panels, but for now, we’ll use the word ‘Panel’ from the Wicket technology - the base of Chameleon technology.

Why our Chameleon technology is really cool
Although the above sounds not to difficult, the real reasons why our Chameleon technology is so cool:

  • The panels can function as different applications - and listen to events from each other
  • The whole mashup can be shown in different comfort zones
  • Each panel can be configured to become a widget that can function in different environments (Java portal with JSR-286, iGoogle, Facebook, OpenSocial, iPhone web app, gadgets on your MacOSX or Vista

Yesterday Eric van den Wildenberg, Director at Brand republic called our technology trendsetting! And he invited me to give a presentation to the whole group of Central Park.

More mashup following
To show and proof the value of mashups, we’ll implement a few more mashups in the coming months:

  • April: social media marketing mashup - easily invite & share from different social networks
  • May: knowledge management mashup - combine different media sources about a specific topic
  • Summer: some more … to come

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Posted in Componence, Vision by Ha Vo | 2 Comments »

Chameleon needs to be more visual and conceptual

Sunday, March 15th, 2009
We need to be more visual to show the value of our Chameleon solution

We need to be more visual to show the value of our Chameleon solution

In the past weeks I have been telling about our Chameleon solution to managers of different type of businesses like music, publishing, health, communities, education and even pharmaceutical.

The concepts are definitely there, they see the interesting possibilities to combine their content with the Web APIs. And with the possibility to let the results or parts of the results be serviced through different channels (communities, partner websites, desktop, mobile) the possibilities for new online business models become even more evident.

But I have also spoken to many designers, creative directors and business consultants. They all said the same thing: you guys are too technical referring to the presentation of a Fanbase 2.0 concept, thinking that it was a lot less technical than all our other presentations.

Componence Fanbase2 0 Solution V2.3 Teaser 20090312

View more presentations from Ha Vo.

In the coming month I will get us some new presentations that will be 100% better for non technical people to visualize their own possibilities with Chameleon! I will work together with external people to make sure that this time Chameleon will sound like a business solution rather than a technical solution. We should be able to present a presentation like this:

Activity Streams & the social networking malaise

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Posted in Componence, Vision by Ha Vo | 2 Comments »

4 portals to start a long tail portal platform

Thursday, November 13th, 2008
After having implemented more than hundred portals in different programs we can say that it must be possible to start a generic portal platform after 4 portals. Just implementing 4 portals, even if they incorporate the most successful business requirements, will not do the job. The goal is to get to the start of a generic platform, that is ready to deploy and maintain 20, 30, 40, … portals. The key is to ensure that the generic requirement is well guarded, as too much custom work will surely take you further away from your long tail ambitions.

The first portal is to keep everyone on board.
Although portal is meant to be the window of your integration framework, it doesn’t mean that it will be easy. On the contrary, developing portals is challenging for any developer who hasn’t developed a portlet before. Thus with limited time and changes you will have to make choices what requirements to implement. The following guidelines will help you to make choices to keep everyone on board:

  • Proof that the portal is the excellent environment to combine different applications into 1 composite application that is richer and has more value for your users than existing applications.
  • Pick those applications that have proven to be successful and improve their usability or add value to them with related content or applications.
  • Solve at least one crucial business process that took too much time and lost too many requests in the process.
  • Make sure that your new search functionality is substantially better than the current search.
  • Include Web 2.0 elements to show a clear sign of progress. (rating, RSS, scraping, AJAX, widgets)
  • Include a generic application to use as a HTTP proxy (scraper). In the many portals that will follow, such a solution will allow each portal to include external applications that have specific added value for the portal.
  • Add more ways to do business with your customers. Don’t worry if new methods like pay-per-download do not succeed immediately, they might work better for another target group in one of your other future portals.

The second one is to improve the concept and to keep the platform generic
You need to get a second business unit on the portal platform to earn back your investments faster. Usually a second portal should take less than 25% of the initial investments for the first portal, presuming that the portal is similar to the first portal. Do allow custom work for the second portal, as probably some of it’s high priority requirements were not implemented during the first portal. Do challenge the ROI for these applications, as custom work in a portal will require substantial investments.

During the first implementation you will see that some parts were designed and/or implemented poorly due to several reasons like time / budget pressure or unclear requirements from the business. In the process of getting the second portal the following development aspects must be taken into account to make the platform mature enough:

  • The performance of the portal and it’s applications must be sufficient to handle the load of many more portals. Evaluate if your ROI / TCO is still valid. At Componence we have a portal caching solution that can increase the throughput on your portal up to 10 times. In any case save enough time and budget to profile your application and increase the performance of your applications. Your long-tail strategy cannot succeed if your platform doesn’t perform well.
  • The applications must become as generic as possible. Validate this with the requirements and specifications for your second portal. Setting up your second portal must be possible with at least 60% through only configuration. In this stage you will probably have to refactor a substantial part of your applications to make them really generic.
  • Time to market of the second portal must be within 2-3 months. It might take 1-2 months to refactor necessary parts of the portal, but after that it should be possible to construct and launch the second portal within 1 month .


The third and fourth portal must be the proof
With two major portals launched the platform has enough components that make both concepts interesting. It’s time to use these components to launch new portals for new segments / niches of your target markets; it’s time to access new revenues with minimal budgets. Let your marketing choose 2 target groups that were not big enough to be serviced before, but not too small to be ignored.

In this phase it’s all about proving the concept. It is important that no specific custom requirements are taken into the concept, as they will ruin your time to market. As the portals will be serving a new market, your business will have a hard time providing the ROI for any custom request anyway.

Create 2 fitting concepts for these markets and only use the existing components of the portal framework. The budget requirements should be 40-60% of the second portal and the development time should be less than 2 months.

Posted in Portal, Vision by Ha Vo | No Comments »

Portal technology is perfect for your long-tail strategy

Thursday, November 13th, 2008
To achieve a succesfull long tail strategy you need an online services platform that uses specific technology that is meant to integrate, aggregate and personalize data and services. The Java Portal technology is the only real technology that is meant for such a purpose. Other systems like CMS, CRM or E-commerce are meant to service specific content and transactions. Portal and SOA are proven technologies to organize these content and services in such a way that it will be easy to combine them into different offerings.
A typical portal is a dashboard with a combination of content and data from different applications. Such applications are integrated in the integration layer with SOA principles and are presented through portlets. The following key aspects make a portal the perfect window to your integrated systems:

  • Each portlet represents an application and can function as such by offering different actions, views, preferences. As such a portal page contains many applications at the same time.
  • Portlets can easily use the webservices that are enabled in your SOA architecture to provide online services in many different context.
  • Portlets are meant to store preferences for specific user roles or users. This makes personalization for users very convenient.
  • With inter portlet communication portlets can use events to show content / services that are relevant to each other. In combination with AJAX technologies a portal page can continuously change based on the actions of within some portlets.
  • A portal framework contains very flexible layout and look & feel features to support different visual concepts. Different enterprise portal platforms offer user friendly management tools. Applying such chances can be as easy as setting up your own iGoogle page.

With all of the above combined a long-tail strategy will be within reach. After first 3 or 4 portals the portal platform will be generic and complete enough to initiate a more aggressive portal strategy. Your organization will be able to launch new portals with different configurations to service specific target audiences within 1-2 months with just 5-10% of the initial investments.

Posted in Portal, Vision by Ha Vo | No Comments »