The Common Sense Web

7 tips for getting started on an Enterprise Web 2.0 project in 2008

Lately, I've had a few more folks than normal ask me for help navigating web projects for their companies -- either as a means to market to customers better or to improve internal communications.  Almost every time, the conversation moves to social media and new Web 2.0 technologies, and how to utilize them to achieve a business goal.

But there is certainly a fine line between clever and "huh?"  It is very, very easy for even the most crafty marketer to preside over a disaster.  I am not a skeptic, however.  You will be fine as long as you are clear on your goals and you maintain focus.

Here are my Top 7 Tips for getting started with Enterprise Web 2.0 in your company.  Some of them may be obvious to some of you, but all told if you can follow these tips, you can avoid the most common pitfalls.

1) Immerse yourself in new technology -- The best way to know about new technology is to use it.  Better yet, become an avid user.  If you are about to scope out a customer-facing Web project especially in 2008, you had better spend a lot of time reading blogs, using technologies like RSS, Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, etc.  Odds are, your web-savvy customers are and the trend is only on the upswing as Web 2.0 becomes more mainstream.  The real benefit here though is in knowing what to pull from in the consumer Web 2.0 world.

2) Educate yourself or talk regularly with someone who knows Web 2.0 -- One of the great things about the explosion of content brought about by the Web is the rampant availability of examples and case studies.  A quick Google search of "Web 2.0 case studies" will land you plenty of examples that will help you brainstorm.  Similarly, there is an active community of Web 2.0 bloggers who cover the latest news & keep you on the cutting edge.  I also recommend Guy Kawasaki's Alltop as a quick way to find the best resources quickly.  If you don't have time for all of this, call a friend who can help you navigate all the noise.

3) Get laser-focused on your goals -- Figure out the one or two business metrics you want to improve, and focus all your energy there.  It could be # of users, page views, leads, sales/revenue, % satisfied customers... whatever.  Just focus.  And when you have difficult trade-offs or decisions to make, always err on the side that gets you closer to your goals.  It seems simple, but it is very easy to lose focus in the heat of the battle.

4) Get laser-focused on your customers' goals -- The biggest Enterprise Web 2.0 disasters I've seen are cases where there is a gaping disconnect between the technology and the needs of the customer.  What do your customers want?  What drives their behavior?  And how will your site help them in a meaningful way.  If you apply social media to your business/customer... and not the other way around... you'll be successful.  i.e. Do not build a Web 2.0 site without first asking a few questions... "Why would someone use the site repeatedly?  Is this better than what we already have?  How?"  I'd almost spend a half hour or so brainstorming & writing down fictitious user testimonials that you'd expect to read if your site proves to be a success.

5) Remember that Web 2.0 is multi-disciplinary -- Effective Enterprise Web 2.0 projects bridge the gap between IT and either marketing or business operations.  So you really need excellence across both to be successful.  Great IT people & developers will work with you to define a project up-front, but will be flexible so you can add minor features or fix some usability issues to help you nail the project.  Great Web marketing & operations share the need for tracking metrics closely so things can be tweaked.  At minimum, you need to know one well & be able to empathize with the other to make the project a success.

6) Don't assume bigger is better -- While managing millions of marketing spend at Microsoft, I had one consistent terrible experience after another with large agencies.  We constantly quibbled over billing rates, whether or not the basics were "in scope", etc.  And we rarely got the big agency's "A-team"... instead we got other parts of the bell curve who we typically had to educate rather than work with as a strategic partner or advisor.  In general, I found our interests were rarely aligned.  I think you'll find that smaller agencies are hungrier and more willing to do whatever it takes to make you successful, and you'll always get their best effort.  We certainly did at Microsoft where it was feasible to do so.

7) Communicate clearly -- Finally, I think it's critical to make sure you are crisp with all your communications around a project like this.  If you aren't crisp, you'll have heartburn somewhere along the way.

• Expectations -- Make sure your team supports your effort.  Make sure you underpromise to your team and management, but let them know the range of outcomes.  Make sure you know your strengths and weaknesses for something like this.  Make sure you have a good idea of what those around you -- colleagues or vendors -- can do.
• Requirements -- It is helpful to be as clear as you can with the people building your site.  Share everything with them -- your goals, priorities, customer needs, your pet peeves, etc.  And be sure to update them as much as you can.  Technology people are very smart but they aren't mindreaders... you have to put a premium on quality communication to get what you want.
• Customer communications -- Odds are your customers will be totally unfamiliar with your new site once you launch.  Optimize your launch around clearly communicating what you want your users to do and how they should go about it.  Clearly communicate the value they will get out of using your site appropriately.  Once they are used to it -- and you have the metrics to prove it -- then you can do bigger/better things, and you can go light on the tutorials/explanations.
• Buzzwords --  Avoid them.  There are plenty of buzzwords in Web 2.0 -- communities, crowdsourcing, collaborative filtering, social graph, semantic Web, etc.  Just don't use the terms.  Explain what you want in plain language.  Others will understand you -- at least those you want to work with.  Let the so-called experts determine what terms should be used to explain your success!

As always, I'm happy to help any friend or regular reader of this blog brainstorm -- no obligation.  Just e-mail me anytime at chris@noticeconsulting.com or check out information on our Enterprise Web 2.0 consulting & development practice.

Gem stuck in one of my unread RSS feeds

I thought I'd share this excellent observation that I found this morning in my list of unread posts from my RSS feeds.  It is the best explanation of my open kimono philosophy re: startups... and why the entrepreneur's biggest enemy may just be him/herself sometimes.  Enjoy!

View article...

Site Changes, et al

Over the weekend, we had a baby.  A new bouncing baby web site, www.noticeconsulting.com. :-)

For whatever reason, we're starting to get more requests about our Enterprise Web 2.0 consulting work.  Since that seems to pay the bills, we thought we'd add more detail about what we do & how we help. 

This isn't to say that we are no longer building social apps... quite the contrary.  In fact, I don't really know how someone could do a great job recommending & implementing Web 2.0 technologies without actually building things of their own. 

So please check us out and recommend us if/when you have a project or know someone who does.  We're easy to work with and we are reasonable.

---

On the applications front, we are continuing to build apps to help service businesses better market their products/services to companies in real time.  We are wrapping up the finishing touches on something for the real estate industry that we think will be interesting.  We are also continuing to work with our first automotive industry customer to make sure we hit the mark with something that vertical will find useful.  Everything we're building has a direct link to social media and our core MinutesNotice technology that some of you have tried in its current Beta on Facebook.  It all ties together nicely, but like any early-stage startup, we are definitely learning a ton as we go along.

Quick Hits - July 16, 2008

It's time for another installment of Quick Hits... more random, highly unsubstantiated thoughts from yours truly...

• The iPhone and Android are the hot technologies du jour according to popular press & bloggers.  While some really innovative things will emerge, so will a lot of failure.  Odds are that we'll hear far more about the successes than the 100x failures.
• Meanwhile, there a lot of relatively new, potentially transformative technologies (Silverlight and Adobe AIR come to mind) that seem to be yesterday's story all of a sudden.  The same could be said for the less transformative but more widely used Blackberry, which is the defacto mobile phone for a lot of corporations willing to spend more money on mobile apps than even iPhone users.
• And what about Nokia's 40%+ share of the global mobile market.  Don't count out Nokia -- I met a lot of smart folks from there when I was at Microsoft.
• Speaking of underserved technologies, Guy Kawasaki commented a few days ago on Twitter that more people use Vista than speak Mandarin.  Crazy.
• Multiple Twits that attempt to lure me to a blog post should be regarded as Spam.  You have one bullet. Fire carefully.  Violators will be removed from the esteemed ranks of those I follow.
• Note to early stage entrepreneurs... if you want me to sign an NDA before doing you the favor of revewing your deal, don't bother.  It's the #1 sign of amateur hour.  Ideas are cheap.  Knowing how to make things work is far more important, and it is where your focus should be.
• And along those lines, I have *never* heard of a deal being stolen from an early stage entrepreneur.  Not saying it doesn't happen... but I am saying it should be the last worry on your mind as an early stage entrepreneur.
• In the world of the economy, would it be so hard for someone to just "take their medicine"?  Homebuyers who bought high.  The Fed.  Distressed banks.  Anyone.  It feels like we are plugging one hole after another with bubble gum.  I'd rather us take our lumps and move on than sit here and watch the economy gradually sour over a prolonged period of time.  Quite frankly, I think Phill Gramm's comments were pretty dead-on.  We are soft as a nation.  And the downside of our prosperity since WWII is that we don't know what real distress is.
• Finally, I am tired of typing with 7 fingers.  My broken finger should heal within the next week or two (I hope!)

The egos in our business astound me

I read the announcement of Jason Calacanis' retirement from blogging this morning with some amusement.  It is pretty funny, yet not altogether unexpected, that someone would make a big deal about it.  Think about the ego you have to have to boldly announce that you're leaving an unpaid position where you may get read by 10,000 people per day... let alone making the announcement via a faux press conference.  Gimme a break.  In terms of readership, you are at most equivalent to a small town newspaper writer.  At most you are yet another tech voice in everyone's lengthy RSS list.. which now just got a little smaller.

This may be effective PR... it may even drive more traffic and attention to Mr. Calacanis and his search engine.  As for me, I'll ignore and move on to the next, far more interesting and relevant story.

Housekeeping & Notice Technologies update

To those of you who have suggested that I get into the lucrative slam poetry business... I say "uh...no."  Ironically enough, while in business school, I did some work very briefly with an Slam Poetry startup, but they expected me to work for the promise of equity which I thought (correctly) was worth just about nothing whatsoever.

But thanks to all of you who dropped me private notes about my treatise on entrepreneurship.  I had one of those days the other day when I was seriously questioning my own sanity and I had to get the thoughts down on paper.

An intersting datapoint in my blog... when I started podcasting because of my broken finger, traffic dropped off bigtime.  I resume typing a few days ago, and we're back up -- at about 5x the traffic I had during the few weeks of podcasting.  One of my semi-regular readers (which I know because he's just about the only user I ever see of Windows Live's Blog Reader) suggested the other day that text is a better medium because it can be easily browsed and it is largely undetectable at work.  Perhaps.  All I know is that podcasts take a lot longer to produce.  So I probably won't be doing that much for the time being until I find a better distribution mechanism like the iTunes and/or Zune podcast directories.  Blogs are definitely not the answer for distributing podcasts... not unless you are insanely popular.

The Notice Technologies update

We at Notice Technologies continue to see a lot of consulting opportunity out there in the social media arena... especially helping enterprises use Web 2.0 and social media.  I just wrapped up a project with Microsoft to build one of their first truly Web 2.0 implementations of Sharepoint -- and the project has been well-received.  It inspired my post on tags, articles, RSS and the enterprise, because I truly think discoverability is the only thing that matters when making employees more productive.  The tools exist today to dramatically improve communication within the enterprise, but they admittedly need a lot of customization to work properly.

We also see a lot of what I call "bottomfeeders" looking for unreasonably inexpensive consulting help.  I'm talking about people who want you to shake the world for say $500-$1,000.  While I can appreciate people wanting to get things done for as little as possible, it can be a bit insulting to make a reasonable quote only to hear that the client's expectation was 15-20% of your good price.  It's sortof the unprofitable "business you don't want."

Ho-hum... it's one of the growing pains of a startup.  You have to work with a few bottomfeeders for each reasonable client you get.  You never know who you are dealing with when you get started.

On the application development front, we have our first paying customer, Land Rover Austin!!  We've been working behind the scenes with them on the product, which 1) is currently in Beta, and 2) we'll talk more about later once we work out a few kinks.  What I can say is that our product solves a *huge* need and we know that their problems are fairly consistent across other businesses like Land Rover.  Vague enough?  Good.

We have peeled back development on Facebook for now for a variety of reasons, some of which I've discussed on this blog before.  The MinutesNotice Beta is mothballed for the time being but will be resurrected at an appropriate time soon.  The good news is that we are using some of the core technology we developed for other purposes that are proving to be more lucrative in the short-term.  We do intend to pick up MinutesNotice again soon, and we have another Facebook idea that is on the backburner.  But all told, I'd say it is pretty accurate that we're moving more in the direction of "social apps" and away from any one social network in particular.

We have a few other opportunities just sortof hanging out... we'll see if anything emerges in these other areas.  But the net of it is that we're seeing significant traction from businesses like Land Rover Austin, and we're hot on the trail!

Onward!

The reality of entrepreneurship

We've all read great, heroic stories of the team that slaves away in a garage only to create the foundation of an iconic company.  But is it real?  Is it common?  A few days ago, I ran across a blog that had some extremely frank thoughts about entrepreneurship... and it inspired me to put together some thoughts of my own on the topic.  I am not a poet, but this seems best suited for poetic style.  Maybe slam poetry on a really bad day. :-)

Quick caveat:  while some of this rings true for us at present, certainly not all of it does.  I am speaking generally of the entrepreneurship experience from lessons learned over 4 of them now...

The Thrill of the Hunt
by Chris Treadaway

long days and nights,
working mostly by yourself or with a partner or two
on new, big ideas
that you are convinced will work
but nobody, not even your closest friends,
thinks you can actually pull off
because you are working with a small team
with limited funds and resources
and more sweat than money,
which you use to build products,
that you find are also being developed
by 10 other companies
with more funding and traction than you,
but yours has the "one feature"
that will be critical for adoption,
so you press on
with a buggy "Beta"
that doesn't at all work as it should,
yet you sell to reluctant customers
who don't ever return your calls
or e-mail messages quickly enough,
which brings you all too much quiet and solitude
all too often;
but when they finally do, they balk at your price
or your offering,
or the minor inconveniences required to work with you,
for reasons that are all too often trivial,
political, and artificial;
but the light at the end of the tunnel
is the first customer
who then won't pay you promptly,
or can't pay you at all,
or will argue with you over the deliverable,
the timeline, or new requirements,
or your presence on-site,
that requires you to hire attorneys
at $300-$400/hour
when you are eating ramen noodles and filling up on soup.

but you press on, fighting to bootstrap your business,
where you might ultimately earn the honor
of earning 75% of the paycheck you earned before
if you are lucky;
or you begin to pitch angels and venture capitalists,
who are naturally suspicious of you,
and who find every excuse in the world,
to crap on your idea and your capabilities,
while you pitch your company, your market, and your team,
and try like hell to sound like you don't need them,
in a vain attempt,
to improve your negotiating position,
when it's pretty certain
that you'll give up a large % of your great idea anyway,
and perhaps control
to people who know finance and investing
a lot better than your business
which in the end has a 20% chance of survival,
and a <5% chance of doing something significant,
either of which you may not be around to see
or even profit from,
for reasons that may or may not be in your control.

But we keep coming back for more,
for it is the thrill of the hunt
that keeps us going,
that keeps us looking,
for the one idea
and the execution
to make us whole.

Quick Hits - July 8, 2008

Starting a new type of blog post, which I'm calling "Quick Hits".  I tend to have a lot of thoughts/observations that aren't exactly flushed out... so I'll share this intellectual drivel with you :-)

Lucky you.

But it fits my current state right now -- I am still recovering from a broken finger, and I can't type quite as efficiently as before.

Here goes:

• Despite all the talk of improvements in Twitter, I sill get about 1 in 4 expected mobile notifications from them.  The experience has led us to create our own notification system... one we can rely upon.  It's too bad.
• I do wonder if Twitter will survive all the technical difficulties.  Now is the time for an upstart to take some share from them.  For a variety of reasons I'll share in the future, I don't think FriendFeed is the answer.
• If Twitter does survive & continue to grow share, it will be a great case for companies establishing quick "brand equity" and doing well despite low switching costs.  Or is the combination of brand recognition and the existing social network each user has enough of a switching cost?
• I have read a lot about the worsening climate for early stage investment.  I haven't seen it.  But we are in an area of tech that helps companies achieve operating efficiency, which should do well in a recessionary environment.
• I think the biggest threat to tech investment is a declining stock market, but not for obvious reasons.  If the market continues to fall, I can foresee a lot of opportunities that will provide a 25% IRR over the next 5-7 years.
• I think Microsoft is interested in Yahoo for the expertise of its rank and file as much as anything else.  I can't tell you how many "software people" I encountered at Microsoft, and how different they were than people who truly understood the Web.

More thoughts on Facebook

Download june30_facebook_dev_realities_Notice_Update.mp3

So long and thanks for Vista

Ok, Bill's legacy will be a lot better than that.  Some thoughts on Bill's departure & where that leaves the Borg.

Download bill_gates.mp3 - 5 minutes