Janet Johnson | The Art of Marketing

I ran across a post today by Ajit Jaokar that described the effects of web 2.0 technologies on enterprise 2.0 companies.

Reading it caused me to ask myself: exactly what defines an enterprise today?

Ajit, who’s a mobile futurist, noted collaboration is pushing the value of an organization to the edges:

“as the Enterprise network matures from a closed/proprietary to open and collaborative; the value shifts to the edge of the network for a company.”

Collaborative environments push knowledge and value beyond the edge (perhaps this is what he means by ‘to the edge of the network’) of a traditional enterprise structure; and into the open source.

The Value of the Open Source Knowledge Worker

I consider myself an open source knowledge worker. Why?

I pay attention, and share it.

I consult with several companies at a time, and have NDA agreements with all of them. While each client is a business unto itself, and I treat information from each one with extreme confidence; every client benefits from my knowledge of who’s talking about them, their products, their markets, their employees.

This cross-pollination occurs all around the globe - beyond the boundary of every enterprise - and it happens in near-real time.

Here’s how:

I’m paying attention for them.

I blog, and am pretty active in the blogosphere from a business (vs. personal) perspective. It forces me to (try to) keep up with news and information that’s important to me and my clients.

I’m paying attention about them.

I subscribe to news and information about every client I have using one of my client’s products, Attensa’s enterprise 2.0 RSS platform.

I’m paying attention to them, for them and about them.

One of my clients is about to install some collaboration software (Clearspace from Jive Software) in part because I was able to confirm Attensa loves it - Scott raves about it, in fact.

I didn’t have to do anything more than:

1. Position it for her in terms of value and benefits to her organization (sometimes technologists need a little translation help)
2. Point her to Scott’s blog about it and add a couple of my own examples of their use

I am not all that unusual, especially when such collaboration tools make it easy to share knowledge between and among enterprise 2.0 and open source knowledge workers; pushing the value beyond the borders of any organization; and propelling it out into the hands of many.

So as you consider the future of your organization, consider the tools you might use to facilitate value at every touchpoint in- and outside the organization. I’ve mentioned a few today.

How to select great open source knowledge workers who can use those tools and generate even more value?

That’s another question entirely…

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I woke up this morning thinking about alchemy. I love the idea of turning common substances (coal) into precious substances (gold) through a mixture of science, wisdom and wizardry. It occurred to me that this is an age of great potential for modern alchemists who turn data into information and then (and this is the magical step) into insights or intelligence.

There was an article in this week’s Economist about Tesco - Britian’s most successful supermarket - moving into the United States armed with powerful retailing science. They have a loyalty program that gives them enormous amounts of data about their customers’ buying habits.

“Tesco’s biggest innovation has been in the way it collects and uses customer data from its Clubcard, a loyalty programme. Many retailers use clubs to provide nothing more sophisticated than a discount to customers as they pay for their goods.

(JJ: simply turning customer data into information)…

The Tesco scheme…. tracks every purchase to build one of the world’s largest databases. This finds correlations between purchases, allowing Tesco to finely tune the product range for each store….

Some quirky correlations also pop out of the data. Take the fact that families buying baby wipes also buy more beer, mainly because fathers of young children have less time to go to the pub. Tesco’s response: mailing families with infants discount coupons for toys and beer.”

(Ahh… there’s the magic - turning information into insights about their customers, and responding with specific offers based on those insights…)

The Philosopher’s Stone

I have a couple of clients who do that for their customers, Chockstone and Attensa. They each take raw data and - using the magic and wisdom of the people who craft their technologies - turn it beyond information into intelligence and insights in the hands of smart marketers.

Chockstone’s loyalty marketing platform (much like the system Tesco uses, I’d imagine) uses the swipe of a card turns customer data into insights. Imagine being a restauraunt franchisee. Previously anonymous customer habits are turned into rich customer profiles like this:

“Customer xxxxxxxxxxxx7852”

Habits: Visits two locations for lunch (42% of time) and dinner (58% of time).

Responds to free food - visit frequency increased by 540% and purchase amount increased 380% during a “free cookie” promotion (from 0.52 visits per week to 3.33 visits per week)

Favorites: favorite sandwich is BLT; second favorite is Ham & Swiss

Average spend: $11.48 per visit (42% greater than the average customer)

As a marketer, that kind of insight into my customers’ habits is priceless. Once those habits are revealed, I can reward them with special offers, thank yous and incent them to return more often.

In the case above, the cost of a free cookie is minimal. Especially in businesses where making loyal customers happy is far more cost-effective than trying to acquire new ones.

Attensa’s Enterprise RSS platform will constantly search the web for information, and deliver it to employees in an intelligent fashion.

Imagine being a global PR firm, for example, and having persistent web searches set up for each of your clients and the executives you work with. (It’s like having TiVO set up for the web.)

You’re immediately notified in your email box, on your Blackberry device or even in your corporate IM system when mentions containing your clients appear. In addition, you can subscribe to your targeted editors’ and analysts’ blogs and news feeds, keeping completely up-to-date on their thoughts, musings and articles.

Attensa’s synchronization ties the server, email, web, instant messaging and Blackberry RSS clients together so articles that are read, filed and deleted are continuously up to date.

Immediate access to your information ecosystem - from wherever, whenever - gives you the insight and opportunity to react quickly to news, events and changing market conditions.

In the spirit of transforming your marketing efforts, think about the modern day alchemists’ tools you might use to turn mounds of data into nuggets of gold.

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Thanks to Jeremy at Social Computing Magazine, the Enterprise 2.0 Uncoalition got a boost this morning.

On the Enterprise 2.0 Conference show floor, Scott from Attensa is blogging about a New Summer of Love. He states:

“Beneath the promise of Enterprise 2.0 apps things are missing.

Some of the obvious missing pieces are:

• The ability to securely and seamlessly move attachments from publishing platforms through feeds to desktop, web and mobile feed readers
• Consistent tagging across collaborative publishing and feed serving and reading platforms to make folksonomies and searching viable across tools
• Dealing with identity and security across apps - to many passwords…so little time.
• The ability to easily create custom feeds from blog and wiki apps that get the right information to the right people with no information overload or underload.”

From my perspective there are four key points to remember when creating applications for Enterprise 2.0 adoption:

• Environment: managed, secure solutions built for network environments
• Attention: accessibility and priority from wherever, whenever
• Productivity: ease-of-use, from synching to sharing
• Integration: with existing Enterprise applications

As we join the Enterprise 2.0 love fest - whether you join the Enterprise 2.0 Uncoalition or not (who wouldn’t want to?) - adoption and success will be measured in people’s use of- and satisfaction with- the results.

That’s a future to love.

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