Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

Internal communications can be hard - even when you’re a small company. Especially when email is so precarious.

Cases in point, just today:

1. I was copied on an email from a broker to a client about a personal loan. I had no business being copied on that note, and have NO idea how it happened, but I didn’t read it (is that unusual?) and immediately deleted it.
2. I copied and pasted a few email addresses from an internal email to a small group of people, and inadvertently cc:d someone outside the organization. Who knew kthomas was Kevin Thomas, not Karen Thomas? Neither Wes (in the first instance) nor I (in copying his email addressees) did.

The ONLY way - in a fast-paced, multiple email address world - to protect and control internal information is to have your internal constituents opt in to RSS feeds for collaborative environments.

The Problem:

I have five email addresses that I maintain. I’m probably a little unusual, but I’ll bet most people have at least two - one personal, one business - in each content record. Poor Wes, in using Outlook, probably entered “Thomas” into his Outlook “To:” file, and Kevin popped right up. God forbid he was on his PDA addressing the note. If he’s like me, and he didn’t have his glasses on, there was no hope for accuracy…

Email is prone to human error, and RSS is a defacto, double opt-in, secure way to get the right information to the right people at the right time. Enterprise-level, managed RSS systems are particularly secure, requiring user authentication from within a firewall.

We have no room for human error when the collective intelligence of well-written tools can protect us from ourselves. I’ve started recommending that clients use RSS systems - like that from one of my clients, Attensa - to collaborate and communicate updates internally. Email is simply too precarious, and too reliant on human accuracy, to protect internal IP.

My friend James Dellow invited me to get the word out about Enterprise RSS Day of Action, which is currently in planning stages. There’s an official WIKI here, and James posted on ChiefTech about it, with the notion of starting a discussion on practical implications of enterprise RSS adoption. I plan to be a vocal advocate.

My email experience today is just one matchstrike fueling the fire for the Enterprise RSS adoption.

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I had an interesting discussion yesterday with my friend Michael Sampson. He’s a blogger, content author and perpetual student of collaboration technologies and real-use cases for them.

Michael’s recently finished an ebook called The 7 Pillars Analysis of Microsoft SharePoint 2007 where he has ranked it as a collaboration platform on a seven-point scale. Without giving too much away, he said SharePoint failed his collaboration litmus test on six of the seven pillars.

Well, you can imagine the stir that’s beginning to cause…

His post about the eBook was picked up on CRN, and the comments there are pretty typical of the blogosphere fanning the flames of a discussion. One comment, from Andrew Brust, Chief of New Technology at twentysix New York, was especially passionate; and in response, Michael published an Open Letter of rebuttal.

In fact, on his “Effective Collaboration” blog, there’s quite a stream of conversations around the specific merits of his opinions, cause and effect, and even a little ethical drama playing out.

In our chat, I told him it might be interesting to further the conversation at the SharePoint conference coming up next week in Seattle. (That made him just a little nervous… I think.) I also wonder (on my own) what the Jive Software guys would think of the paper?

My bottom line? If you’re going to take a stand in the blogosphere, and (particularly when you) point out the emperor is only wearing socks, enjoy the reaction… ’cause you’re going to get it.

I believe Michael is perfectly capable of holding his own. And I’m anxious to watch the story unfold. Regardless, I hope it spurs sales. Likely it will. Any PR is good PR, after all…

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I’m just plain happy this morning. Maybe it was the lunar eclipse, maybe some great meetings this morning, and maybe, just maybe it’s that I’ve felt terribly productive this morning. I’m pretty excited that my RSS reader - from Attensa (a client of mine) - gives me the capability to tag my persistent search results (and have them appear in my del.icio.us account) and comment on blog posts that reference my persistent searches right from within the RSS reader itself.

I don’t have to follow a link to the site, I just get a little window with the post right in it, and can comment right from there, saving tons of time.

Check it out - hoping the thumbnail shot here will work for y’all. (Just click on it, and you’ll see the whole shebang…)

You can also see that Attensa searches 18 different sites for the most up-to-date mentions of any keyword combinations you want to track. Attensa’s RSS reader is free (as is their virtual feed server for little [1-5 people] groups - enterprises pay, but the increased productivity I’ve seen will quickly pay for itself), and you can download it from Attensa’s site for Outlook, Mac, or web reading…

Eclipses are cool, wherever you find them.

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Brilliant acronym. Found a story about it on Scott’s blog over at Attensa. Brilliant concept to (ahem) share…

One of his clients has a few set rules for collaboration across the enterprise:

“Here’s his advice on bringing the technological and cultural initiatives together.

• Get knowledge brokers and connectors into the pool of early adopters for Enterprise 2.0 pilot programs so they can share their experience and lead by example.
• Cultivate the skill of knowing where and how to find relevant information.
• Reward team members who find and share those gems of information that can solve a problem or advance the business. Tag it, forward it, republish it.”

Thanks for sharing, Scott! (Via Attensa)

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I had a cup of tea today with a marketing colleague who was new to Portland. We found we had much in common, especially when discussing shared interests in social media, new marketing paradigms and the growing intersection between the IT and marketing departments.

These are two departments with many common goals, dependencies and business alignments and (at the same time) few common languages.

I am lucky enough to be able to bridge the two worlds - knowing just enough about IT to be dangerous, but able to find (or fake) my way around with willing compatriots. It’s like going to Paris and making an attempt at speaking French - trying will get you a long way…

Hence, I try to use this forum to speak to both worlds about trends marketers should be aware of AND be able to speak to, and marketing needs the IT department can fill.

Here’s my latest flog at the state of information overload, which is only getting worse (but at the same time it can be so much better through the use of smart tools). I hope the marketers and IT guys are ‘getting’ this. Share this with your favorite “other department” compatriot - you’ll be doing both of you a favor…

Managing and Measuring Attention Across the Enterprise

As any regular reader knows, I’m a big fan of RSS, a protocol web sites use to deliver information to you when it appears. (It’s that good old fashioned notion of having a magazine delivered to your home, vs. going out and searching through the newsstands for the latest issue.)

The problem with RSS?

While it gives you great access to information, RSS dramatically increases the amount of information presented to you (depending on your search parameters) and in itself contributes to information overload. (When I fire up my Attensa feed reader I generally can have more than 700 articles waiting for me. Full disclosure: Attensa is a client of mine; and a tool I use daily for online news, research, monitoring client mentions and competitive information.)

Just like I am, enterprise 2.0 knowledge workers are beginning to understand the value of RSS; and are bringing their personal readers (which are all free, by the way) into their work environment. Suddenly, there are desktops with ALL SORTS of little RSS applications running.

Suddenly, There’s a Problem for IT

It drives IT’s support and service costs through the roof when unapproved, (sometimes poorly written) applications start interacting and mucking with other apps, network services, etc. That’s a bad thing.

The good news? There are enterprise-class, managed RSS systems available now that are not only secure, scalable and reliable (which speaks to our friends in IT); they track a wealth of information that’s invaluable to the business (which speaks to our friends in marketing).

Imagine the possibilities of this kind of understanding within your organization:

• As users interact with information, their behaviors provide clues as to what is important to them, and what is not important.
• Attensa can monitor these behaviors and create a smart profile of each user’s attention.
• These individual profiles drive intelligent filters / views that each user can use to consume relevant information.

As a result, I can focus my attention on information that matters - and not have to wade through the 700 pieces of information it makes possible.

It’s like my iPhone figuring out how I type, and fixing my fat thumb mistakes for me.

It’s amazing to me that a tool can ‘watch’ hundreds of factors and learn reading behaviors and content preferences as readers interact with information. For an entire enterprise full of users, it will watch:

• Which subscriptions are read most frequently?
• How many articles are being read, given the number available?
• How long does each user spend reading an article, given its length?
• Is the information being forwarded to others?
• Is it being tagged or republished?
• Or, is being ignored completely or deleted instantly?

Then, individual reading behaviors are matched to content cues in the articles themselves including:

• Content keywords
• Authors that are read frequently
• Search terms being tracked

As user behaviors change, the “attention analytics” will evolve with them. I am training my RSS reader to prioritize my information for me, and serve it to me in a unique, personal manner. Smart.

Better yet, though, when you add the Feed Server™ , individual profiles are aggregated across workgroups, product teams, even the entire enterprise; delivering rich reporting and analytics that drive a collaborative, more intelligent understanding of how knowledge spreads across the enterprise.

This is waaay more powerful than web analytics. This is attention analytics. Now we’re getting closer to getting inside the heads of our employees; being able to watch what grabs their attention, what keeps it, and what isn’t cutting it. As a marketer, if I could have that insight, I’d be tuned to that channel. Perhaps that’s why RSS is coming soon to televisions…

And for knowledge workers, suddenly the glut of information they’re facing is more manageable - because it’s served up based on their individual preferences.

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