Janet Johnson | The Art of Marketing

Here’s a glimpse inside how British Telecom has adopted enterprise 2.0 technologies like blogging, wikis, enterprise RSS and podcasts to power their intranet and engage their knowledge workers. Fascinating case study, and well worth scrolling through the slides. Thanks for sharing, Richard Dennison.

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I’ve been thinking and talking a lot about seamless connectivity lately - and so have other, way more influential people in the IT space, thank goodness. From a CIO’s perspective, I should think that seamless connectivity for their users should be key. Knowledgeworkers shouldn’t have to suffer from partial solutions or difficult integrations from their vendors or IT department.

Apparently, there’s a conversation bubbling up about Microsoft’s Feedsync announcement earlier this month. It astounded Mike Gotta, and I’m glad. Mike’s an analyst with the Burton Group, and I believe he has influence as well as obvious insight - at least, I hope so. In his Dec. 6 post, Mike said:

“Microsoft has not articulated any coherent vision on feeds in general so my initial reaction is that this announcement strikes me as somewhat of a “one off”.”

James Dellow, another smart, enthusiastic enterprise 2.0 blogger I follow over at ChiefTech riffed:

“is it also a failure in the enterprise IT camp itself for failing to recognise why this important piece of messaging and computing architecture is so important? i.e. if they don’t ask for, they won’t build it”

I couldn’t agree more with both fellows. I only hope they have more pull with the CIOs in the world. I sometimes get frustrated that I approach the IT equation from a relative position of powerlessness. I’m a user. A marketer who relies on IT for my information. I know the business benefits of an interlinked, powerful IT organization. And I know the power of a secure, robust, enterprise RSS system - because of my relationship with Attensa, not Microsoft. Go figure.

I just hope the ears and eyes of CIOs are open and listening to James and Mike. I am a firm believer that customer requests are what drive business decisions.

It must be hard to be customers of Microsoft sometimes.

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I love the end of a year/beginning of a New Year. It always gives me the opportunity to look back over the past 360+ days and note what I’ve loved, and what I want to do differently in my life. I’m starting to think about that now - and here’s what I’ve loved from a work perspective. (Don’t worry, you’re not missing out on much, those who really know me understand I put most of my energy these days into work.)

1. Yoga. As a business tool, a healthy body is essential. As a bonus, somehow twisting, stretching and standing on your head a few times a week really helps your thinking. I discovered yoga as I watched my sweetie blossom by practicing, and now I’m hooked. It has truly given me more energy, more creativity and more perspective.
2. Apple. With my Mac and iPhone, I have complete connectivity and control over my schedule where ever I am during a day. Critical for a consultant, I had no idea how hard I had to work at my Blackberry to get it to work halfway (fine for email, poor at everything else). I was an Apple Business Development Manager in the late 80’s; and was sucked back into the Wintel platform once I got into the Internet startup/telecom world. The iPhone hoopla was lost on me when it came out. It took a stint at a client, Chockstone, who used Macs prolifically around the office, to get me back to the Mac. And the commercials are hilarious.
3. USB Drives. In conjunction with my iPhone, I’m able to be a self-contained unit wherever I go as long as I have my files on my thumb drive. And for someone who has schlepped her laptop around the country, there’s nothing that feels more free than tucking a drive into my purse and walking, hands-free, to the train into a client.
4. RSS. I write about RSS a ton, and have a client, Attensa, who’s developed the most secure enterprise RSS platform available. But as a small consultancy, I’ve found RSS to be an integral tool to keeping up with client coverage, watching trends, and reacting quickly to competitive announcements, etc. News and information comes to me. I’m pretty lazy - so having something with a much greater reach and awareness watch for me is a kick.
5. iGoogle. Having an iGoogle account this year saved my bacon many times. My workaround for getting to my calendar anytime, anywhere (except from my Blackberry - where it was one-way communication only) was Google calendar. It was brilliant - sending alerts and reminders to me (on my Blackberry) of meetings and locations. I was able to log on from any client or Starbucks, and get a full view of my day/week/month. And the Docs and Spreadsheets were fantastic for capturing client meeting notes and sharing information collaboratively with teams of people. I used them regularly for one client, OpenMake, who has people all over the country who need to collaborate and capture information.
6. Smartbrief. Okay, so here’s a bonus - since I wonder how many people will really give me credit for the Yoga tool - I love Smartbriefs. They’re daily compilations of news about a whole bunch of subjects. I subscribe to the IAB Smartbrief to keep up with news about online marketing trends and such. When I worked for Chockstone, they served the restaurant industry - so I found a NRA Smartbrief that served up information about restaurant trends. The quality of the content is excellent, and Smartbriefs are free.

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I’m working on a bunch of research for clients these days, testing out new online tools. In preparation for the research, I’ve done a bit of research on how research should be conducted. One of the most enlightening pieces I’ve found (via Jim McGee at the Fast Forward Blog) was called “You and Your Research” which is a transcript of Dr. Richard Hamming - scientist at the Bell Laboratory for more than 40 years - presenting to his colleagues. The end of his formal presentation was this:

“In summary, I claim that some of the reasons why so many people who have greatness within their grasp don’t succeed are: they don’t work on important problems, they don’t become emotionally involved, they don’t try and change what is difficult to some other situation which is easily done but is still important, and they keep giving themselves alibis why they don’t. They keep saying that it is a matter of luck. I’ve told you how easy it is; furthermore I’ve told you how to reform. Therefore, go forth and become great scientists!”

I found it a fascinating inspiration for beginning my research processes, and pretty much engagement in all customer-facing endeavors.

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Once in awhile, it’s good to go back to basics. I have been preaching the value of the blogosphere to business for years now, and there are some fundamental assumptions that I take for granted.

A basic premise worth repeating is case in point. I always follow the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s WOMMA Code of Ethics:

The essence of the WOMMA Ethics Code comes down to the Honesty ROI:

• Honesty of Relationship: You say who you’re speaking for
• Honesty of Opinion: You say what you believe
• Honesty of Identity: You never obscure your identity

Since I first wrote my first white paper on blogging for business, I have always urged honesty, transparency and authenticity for anyone engaging in the blogosphere.

It has saved my bacon time and again - especially in the early days of blogging for Marqui. We were responsible for a huge ethical debate in the blogosphere, and came away relatively unscathed, thanks to our honesty and transparency…

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