May 18, 2007 - 1:05PM
Deceptive clicks on Internet advertising links distributed by Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and other online marketing vehicles are probably occurring far more frequently than the network operators acknowledge, according to a study by fraud detection specialist Fair Isaac Corp.
The chicanery involves automated computer programs or scam artists who repeatedly click on ad links with no intention of buying anything. The short ad links, which appear alongside search results and other content at thousands of Web sites, typically trigger a commission with each click _ a financial formula ripe for mischief, Minneapolis-based Fair Isaac found.
The study's preliminary conclusions, scheduled to be discussed Friday during a Fair Isaac conference in San Francisco, threaten to revive suspicions among advertisers that they have been overcharged as part of a ruse known as "click fraud."
After reviewing a handful of Web sites since last August, Fair Isaac believes 10 to 15 percent of the advertising traffic is "pathological," indicating a likelihood of click fraud, said Joseph Milana, the company's chief scientist of research and development.
"It's still an early result," Milana said. "The question remains about how broad the problem is in the entire marketplace."
The culprits behind click fraud typically are either trying to make more money from the ads appearing on their own Web sites or maliciously trying to drain the marketing budgets of a competitor.
Google, which runs the Internet's largest ad network, maintains its engineers and filters identify all but 0.02 percent of the click fraud on its network. The Mountain View-based company says it doesn't bill advertisers for any of the flagged click fraud.
Yahoo, which runs the second-largest ad network, also maintains its preventive measures weed out all but a small portion of click fraud.
Fair Isaac's initial estimates fall in the same range as those made by Click Forensics, a San Antonio-based consulting service that compiles a quarterly index tracking click fraud rates.
Other studies have estimated click fraud rates as high as 30 percent, a figure implying advertisers have paid billions of US dollars for bogus sales referrals during the past few years.
Google and Yahoo have consistently ridiculed double-digit click fraud estimates as the handiwork of search engine consultants trying to drum up more demand for their services by alarming advertisers.
On the flip side, Google and Yahoo have a powerful incentive to debunk the click fraud claims to preserve confidence in a system that generates most of their profits. Last year alone, Google and Yahoo sold a combined $16 billion in Internet ads.
Fair Isaac enters the debate with a track record for ferreting out fraudulent conduct in other industries.
Best known for a scoring system that rates the creditworthiness of consumers, Fair Isaac also has helped banks fight credit card fraud for 15 years. More recently, the company has sold anti-fraud tools to health care providers and telecommunications companies.
Now, Fair Isaac is trying to determine whether click fraud is a big enough problem to justify the company developing a potential solution that could help boost its own profits. "This is a problem that fits well in our sweet spot," Milana said.
Click fraud doesn't appear to be a major problem when the ads appear on Google's and Yahoo's respective Web sites, Milana said.
The trouble starts cropping up once Google and Yahoo deliver the ads to other Web sites that are part of their vast marketing networks.
"They just don't know what happens beyond their own firewalls," Milana said of Google and Yahoo.
Ads on other Web sites accounted for $4.16 billion, or 39 percent, of Google's revenue last year. Google shared $3.31 billion of that revenue with its advertising partners. Yahoo doesn't break out how much of its revenue comes from ads on other Web sites.
21.5.07
Aberdeen Report: Creating A Customer Centric Marketing Organization
Marketing executives face a constant stream of pressures—pressure to accommodate customers, business pressure from executives to meet corporate goals, and pressure for virtuosity in performing key marketing functions. In addition, there is increasing uncertainty stemming from converging sales, marketing, and distribution channels. These pressures to find the smoothest path to the bottom line, and utilize the technologies that best integrate all the customer data collected at each point and channel of customer interaction, are omnipresent for organizations of all sizes, revenues and industries.
KEY BUSINESS FINDINGS
In a recent study published by Aberdeen Group, findings revealed that creating a customer-centric marketing organization provides significantly higher return on marketing investment (ROMI) and has become a driving imperative for chief marketing officers. Five hundred companies were surveyed to gain insight into how organizations enhance customer relationships and grow revenues through marketing initiatives.
The research revealed that best-in-class marketers consistently demonstrate higher performance across KEY business and marketing metrics, they also measure specific metrics that directly link marketing efforts and overall business goals.
Sample of the findings:
Fifty-percent of small and mid-market enterprises lead in capturing 70% of current customer profiles
50% have centralized customer knowledge and data management processes in place
Customer data is utilized to perform customer profitability modeling at rates significantly above average – 41% versus 33%
According to Aberdeen, technologies that will yield best-in-class results must enable integration of data and enhance sophistication of marketing processes in order to add value.
Download the FREE Aberdeen Study Creating a Customer-Centric Marketing Organization.
KEY BUSINESS FINDINGS
In a recent study published by Aberdeen Group, findings revealed that creating a customer-centric marketing organization provides significantly higher return on marketing investment (ROMI) and has become a driving imperative for chief marketing officers. Five hundred companies were surveyed to gain insight into how organizations enhance customer relationships and grow revenues through marketing initiatives.
The research revealed that best-in-class marketers consistently demonstrate higher performance across KEY business and marketing metrics, they also measure specific metrics that directly link marketing efforts and overall business goals.
Sample of the findings:
Fifty-percent of small and mid-market enterprises lead in capturing 70% of current customer profiles
50% have centralized customer knowledge and data management processes in place
Customer data is utilized to perform customer profitability modeling at rates significantly above average – 41% versus 33%
According to Aberdeen, technologies that will yield best-in-class results must enable integration of data and enhance sophistication of marketing processes in order to add value.
Download the FREE Aberdeen Study Creating a Customer-Centric Marketing Organization.
17.5.07
CRM Magazine: Is Salesforce.com Changing Direction?
by Marshall Lager Tuesday, May 01, 2007
When Salesforce.com announced its 25,000-seat customer win with Merrill Lynch on February 27, it also showcased Salesforce Wealth Management Edition, the vendor's first release targeting a vertical market. The deal size is significant--even its pilot program was larger than most Salesforce.com implementations--but the real surprise is the vertical product itself.
Salesforce.com, and its chairman and CEO Marc Benioff, formerly took an antivertical stance, stating that Salesforce.com is easily customizable and expandable to any need, and insinuating that vertical solutions don't truly address the needs of individual businesses. Siebel was often targeted because of its vertical focus, but now it appears the taunts were a smokescreen.
"If it's disingenuous, it's not the first time a person or business has changed their approach," Jeff Kaplan, managing director of THINKstrategies, says of the switch in attitude toward verticals.
"If it's Machiavellian--distracting the industry while preparing to do verticals their own way--that wouldn't be surprising either."
Many analysts believe the maneuver is smart both for the company and for the industry. "It shows how the SaaS model continues to evolve; even horizontal applications like CRM and SFA can be configured to meet specific industry needs," Kaplan says. "From Salesforce.com's perspective it's good, because it broadens the market opportunity without stretching them too far. It's not too different from what they've done in the past, and they can achieve it through third parties. It's a perfect example of how to leverage AppExchange."
Martin Schneider, an enterprise software analyst with The 451 Group, says that the vertical turn isn't something Salesforce.com would do rashly. "Salesforce.com isn't just saying 'We're going vertical like everybody else'; they're seeing where the need is greatest, and where they can do well with a vertical product. They picked somewhere that they could undersell the incumbents and still perform well."
Salesforce.com's vertical editions aren't even big news. "There isn't much vertical customization in the CRM itself; it's what AppExchange and the open platform can offer," Schneider says. Kaplan agrees: "This is part of the natural evolution of the market. As Salesforce.com gets bigger, it becomes a bigger target for criticism." Strategies that would once have caused unbridled excitement are viewed with skepticism now that the company is an industry leader.
Whether the new vertical focus is good or bad for Salesforce.com, the company will have to walk a fine line when it comes to rolling out new functionality. Much of that functionality is not native to Salesforce.com, but supplied by partners and other vendors via AppExchange. "Salesforce.com does have a tendency to step on its partners' toes when it comes to announcing enhanced functionality," Kaplan says. Schneider echoes the metaphor: "It's going to be tough not to step on the partners' toes. This announcement goes against past statements, including some very recent pro-partner announcements."
The challenge isn't for Salesforce.com to provide good vertical applications--it's to keep the balance between promoting its own capabilities and keeping its partnerships intact. "Partners want to be added-value vendors, not an extended sales team for Salesforce.com," Schneider says. "Making the simultaneous VAR and on-demand model work is hard. Salesforce.com will have as much trouble as anybody else." --Marshall Lager
Two Questions for Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com
CRM magazine: You have previously denounced the need for vertical applications. Why did you recently announce the first vertical offering, Salesforce Wealth Management Edition?
Benioff: Since our inception I've never been a fan of verticals. Really what happened were two things: We started aggregating customers by a number of key verticals. When we got into financial services they started to ask us to customize our product with a number of things. We [later discovered] our product really was satisfying a lot of them, and not just small and medium ones--where we have a lot of presence--but really the biggest in the world, including Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank and others. That's why we need to focus on the financial services industry, because, first and foremost, our largest customer is now in financial services. Second, we ended up having a lot of demand-specific expertise.
CRM magazine: Which vertical will you target next?
Benioff: We see expansion into the media as well as into the nonprofit sector, where we also have a strong presence, as well as in the high-tech and manufacturing areas. David Myron
Web ads work, even if you don't see them - iTnews.com.au - May 15 2007
By Robert Jaques, 15 May 2007 11:45 AEST
Even incidental exposure to advertising on commercial websites may have a significant impact on consumers, new research has revealed.
A study by US academics due to be published in the June issue of the Journal of Consumer Research found that website banner ads influence surfers even if they are not aware of having seen them.
"Regardless of measured click-through rates, banner ads may still create a favourable attitude towards the ad due to repeated exposure," wtote Xiang Fang (Oklahoma State University), Surendra Singh (University of Kansas) and Rohini Ahluwalia (University of Minnesota).
"Effects of mere exposure are expected to grow in a marketplace where consumer attention is often focused elsewhere."
"Effects of mere exposure are expected to grow in a marketplace where consumer attention is often focused elsewhere."
The researchers investigated whether "mere exposure effect", a condition in which people develop a positive perception of stimuli not presented to them on a noticeable level, was also applicable to incidental advertising.
In a series of experiments, they discovered that even if people could not recall the content of the ad, repeated exposure led to familiarity, which then led to positive feelings.
"Our research could have important theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, it enhances our understanding of the process underlying the mere exposure effect," said the researchers."
Practically, it provides some useful guidelines for advertisers to develop more accurate measures of banner ad effectiveness."
Participants had more positive evaluations towards the target banner ad as exposure frequency increased. Surprisingly, participants also showed high levels of tolerance for banner ads on which they were not directly focused.
According to the researchers, common wear-out effects were not apparent even after 20 exposures.
"Our results suggest that the fluency resulting from frequent passive exposure, and the consequent spontaneous affective reaction, provide a crucial link between exposure and positive impressions," wrote the authors.
"Such spontaneous affects influenced evaluative judgments through a more complex process, likely by colouring the interpretation of the fluency experience and the nature of resulting meta-cognitions relating fluency with liking."
16.5.07
It's web take 2.0 - SMH - May 15, 2007
MAKING a name for your business in a national market is never easy. It's even harder when you're a small start-up company based at Ballarat in regional Victoria.
Sometimes a lateral approach to the market can help - such as providing a free service to get your name out there and get potential paying customers hooked.
That small start-up, Imaging Associates, decided that a web 2.0 tool could help give them that edge. Imaging Associates provides a specialist service and software to help professional digital photographers calibrate their computer systems.
The company chose to use a swicki - a combination of search and wiki software - to build a community of interest (and potential customers) around its company website. The swicki software, developed by the New Zealand company Eurekster, enables web searching that produces only the targeted search results wanted by that specialist community.
The swicki search engine learns from the popularity of the links clicked by the software developers, multimedia designers, digital photographers and graphic artists who use them.
The swicki went live in September last year, and immediately doubled IA's site traffic. Since February, traffic to the IA site has increased by 10 per cent each month.
"It was a very good way that we could gain publicity for our site," says Imaging Associates' webmaster, Simon Reid. "We can provide a service by putting in some of our time to moderate the search engines that we've created, and in return it's gaining publicity for our site.
"We've definitely found a very positive response, in terms of learning about what people are looking for, and people discovering Imaging Associates."
The company has since built swickis for even more specific topics. Each requires maintenance of about one hour a week. The swickis are free for Imaging Associates to create, with Eurekster deriving revenue from ads on the swicki sites.
Swickis are among a clutch of technologies described under the collective tag of web 2.0. The term has many definitions, but is generally applied to web pages or applications that can be easily altered by users, rather than just being passively read.
The technology has also come to represent a spirit of free and open communication between or among companies and the users of their products and services. Hence, some web 2.0 technologies are also called social media technologies.
Blogs and wikis are the most common examples of web 2.0 technologies, but the label has been applied to many others, such as mash-ups, tagging, and virtual worlds.
The main focus of web 2.0 developers has been applications for consumers, such as the online task management service called Remember the Milk, or the parenting information service Minti. Some have been adopted by small businesses such as Imaging Associates, but to date few larger Australian businesses have plunged into the social media pool.
One exception is the not-for-profit World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Its former manager of online communications, Grant Young, says the WWF is becoming a convert to web 2.0 technologies, having recently created its first organisational blog focused on what people can do to reduce their environmental footprint, using software from US company WordPress.
The WWF has also set up a travel diary blog for a staff member travelling to Macquarie Island, using software from another US supplier, Blogger, which is owned by Google. The WWF communications team is using an internal wiki for sharing information within its marketing team, and is looking to expand that across the organisation.
Mr Young, who is now working at digital media consultancy Digital Eskimo, says there is much interest in the use of these social media technologies throughout the WWF globally. "We definitely see it as an opportunity to meet people where they are at, rather than constantly trying to drag people to where we are," Mr Young says. "Our website is for anybody to find, but quite often they may not think of WWF as an organisation that is working in a particular area. So we go to where they would be looking. And everything from search engine optimisation to web 2.0 tools are methods of doing that."
WWF is also a heavy user of email and manages this using the Campaign Monitor online service from Australian developer FreshView. As a small software developer, FreshView is a heavy user of web 2.0 technology, with an active corporate blog.
Mr Young says he has appreciated having close access to the product's developers through the blog, as they have been highly responsive to support requests. Several of Mr Young's suggestions have since been incorporated into FreshView products.
"Their blog has been fantastic - particularly for us when we were redeveloping our newsletter," Mr Young says. "The blog has a gallery that promotes their customers' emails, and it was a really rich way for us to get an idea about what other people were doing and how they were doing it."
Adopting the web 2.0 ethos has paid benefits for FreshView, a company that employs only five people and spends next to nothing on marketing. Co-founder David Greiner says the company has created a very active community, allowing it to sign up 25,000 registered customers including Apple and eBay.
"We relied on word of mouth and blogs and message boards and online communities to get the word out," Mr Greiner says.
Whether companies such as Imaging Associates and WWF will prove to be early adopters of a mainstream trend is still unknown.
According to social technologies researcher Ross Dawson, some information-intensive organisations, including law firms and banks, are the most active in investigating the benefits of web 2.0 technology, as an extension of ongoing knowledge management developments.
"Web 2.0 in the enterprise is about enabling people to better find information and work with it," Mr Dawson says. "There are some sweet spots, which are very natural applications for blogs and wikis where it makes a lot of sense. And these are projects, competitive intelligence, and many other things where you are trying to get broad information and input on a specific topic."
In the case of competitive intelligence, for instance, a wiki can be set up to allow employees to input information they may have learnt about their organisation's competitors, and rely on their colleagues to collaborate or correct their entries. The same can be true of corporate blogs.
"There's a lot of cynicism around whether it is worth doing or not, but done well, in the right sort of organisation, it is a way to get greater visibility and awareness of capabilities across the organisation."
Mr Dawson also believes that blogs and wikis can become an alternative to email.
"Email as a communication platform is experiencing breakdown because people have too many emails. If you can start to shift activity outside of email, that's enormously valuable and more effective and more productive."
According to Martin Wells, the chief executive officer of the Australian web 2.0 software developer Tangler, many large corporations are limiting their use of web 2.0 tools to just another tool for marketing, as they are struggling with losing control of their communications.
"They don't see this as really opening a channel of conversation for users, or tapping in to the creativity and passions of users and how loyal they are," Mr Wells says. "They just see this as another medium. Some 2.0 technologies will get into enterprises this year, but I don't think the actual 2.0 spirit that's behind it. It will take a number of years before that is taken advantage of by the enterprise."
Tangler's product, which is still in testing, is a web-based service for enabling website visitors to to communicate with each other. Hence, a company can quickly create a community from its users and learn from their discussions.
However, according to Tangler's marketing director Mick Liubinskas, these benefits can be swamped by concerns over the increasing level of regulation under which companies find themselves working, and the risk-averse legal perspective this engenders. Hence, they stick with traditional methods of reaching consumers, even though consumer audiences are fragmenting, thanks in part to blogs and podcasts.
"So they keep chasing the users wherever they go, and the users are running away because they are sick of the corporates yelling at them," Mr Liubinskas says. "So from a marketing perspective there is going to be a continued mess for a while."
Consumer goods manufacturer Kimberly-Clark is another to test some of the concepts around web 2.0. The company has made extensive use of its website to solicit feedback relating to its Huggies disposable nappies. The company has used online forums since 2002, which now include 19,000 members in Australia and New Zealand.
According to Lisa Liaros, senior brand manager for Huggies, , the forum was established to give parents a form of communication and support with each other that was available at any time.
"It is a safe space where any question can be asked and answered by other parents and carers," Ms Liaros says. "We often ask mums their thoughts on new products and ideas and have recruited mums to test and trial products as needed.
Ms Liaros says that the parenting forums have become an integral part of Huggies' marketing mix, with more than 600,000 posts since it was launched, and the company's experts are now receiving more than 100 questions a month.
"Through the forum, Huggies is able to build a strong relationship with parents that hopefully builds loyalty to Huggies products. "The options for communication and interaction that web 2.0 technologies present are widening rapidly. The concept of virtual worlds, in particular, shot to prominence in the past six months. Australian companies such as Telstra, the ABC and web technology company Hyro have opened sites within the Second Life virtual environment, providing a new avenue for interacting with users, business partners or even potential recruits, although most of these efforts are experimental, rather than commercial.
Sydney-based Yoick is currently testing its virtual world technology, dubbed Outback Online, which allows an organisation to create its own virtual environment, or outback. These outbacks utilise peer-to-peer technology developed by the IT research organisation NICTA to overcome problems experienced in Second Life in terms of the number of users it can support in one place at one time.
According to Yoick's chief executive officer, Randal Leeb-du Toit, there is strong demand from companies to showcase or test goods or services in a virtual environment.
"(Outback Online) came out of extensive discussions with industry, so we knew what they didn't want, and as a result could work out what they would want," Mr Leeb-du Toit says.
Similarly, Australian start-up VastPark is developing a three-dimensional content portal and toolset. The company is aiming to become an online portal for members of the 3-D industry to promote its work, but in the longer term will offer a platform for creating 3-D showrooms or classrooms. A multi-user version of VastPark will be released soon.
VastPark's chief executive officer Bruce Joy says the goal is to create an environment where someone can undertake a very small development and build it into a larger community.
NEXT SPEAK
� Blog - an easy-to-use web publishing tool - e.g. TypePad, Blogger.com
� Mash-up - where different technologies are blended to manipulate and display information - e.g. Google Maps
� Social network - tools for managing communications between people of related interests - e.g. LinkedIn
� Swicki - a search engine tailored to a community of interest -e.g. Eurekster
� Tagging - where users help to organise sets of information -e.g. Del.icio.us
� Wiki - a site that can be edited by visitors - e.g. Wikipedia
� Virtual world - an online three-dimensional virtual environment - e.g. Second Life.
MyCyberTwin
ONE OF the problems with social media technologies is that companies need new systems to handle and benefit from the increased level of communication.
Local start-up MyCyberTwin is developing a web-based technology platform that can respond on behalf of a person or an organisation even if they are not actually online at the time. Known as a CyberTwin, the user trains the software with basic question-and-answer routines.
MyCyberTwin's chief executive officer, Liesl Capper, says many websites are very one-dimensional "brochure-ware", and force users to navigate large amounts of information.
As a consumer product, CyberTwin gives users a personality online at any hour of the day. But the CyberTwin can also be trained to respond on behalf of a company, handling routine queries and forming a new channel for communication with customers.
"You can't do this with staff - there are just not enough. From a brick-and-mortar perspective it can serve as a representative of your company that chats and finds out about people," Ms Capper says.
Ms Capper says normally a company will train representatives to ask or answer questions such as how the consumer found out about the company, or what products they are interested in. This function can easily be taken over by the trained software agent.
Ms Capper says she consulted extensively with businesses, including major media companies, while developing MyCyberTwin, and is already working with the owner of a popular web dating site to give its members more options for handling inquiries.
Asia-Pacific execs bare priorities for 2007 (May/08/2007)
By Jose Allan Tan
Business continuity is still important (27.9 percent) for many businesses particularly those open in disaster prone markets such as Taiwan, Japan, and Indonesia. This also applies to markets like Thailand and the Philippines where disruption to business may come in the form of political or economic uncertainties. And as the cable disruption disaster that occurred in Taiwan in December 2006 shows, disruption in one market will impact those operating in other geographies.
Workforce collaboration is deemed less important than cost cutting and minimizing business disruption. This reflects market observation that many companies are unfamiliar with collaborative tools (more so than their Western counterparts). Asian businesses are inclined to invest in technology or processes that are new and unproven. Asia's business managers often take a wait-and-see approach in introducing solutions that may are seen as untested (particularly among their local peers).
As businesses adopt mobile technology to get closer to their customers, this exposes the inadequacies of present-day security policies and strategies to hostile elements. Ken Low, Security Marketing Director at TippingPoint observes that even as companies (of all sizes) grow in reliance on their networks, many aren't proactively doing something to improve their network security.
It's May and we are approaching the middle of the year. Business is booming right across Asia-Pacific. The world economies are in constant movement, with consolidation and expansion rampant across much of Asia. Nearly every industry is moving forward despite rumors of a potential slowdown in the world's largest economy -- the US. The world doesn't appear too concerned. Instead business managers are busy scheming to expand territories and searching for partners.
Enterprise Innovation surveyed its readers in March 2007 to identify what the business and technology concerns are for the year. Some of the responses took us by surprise. Others affirmed our long-held belief that we are in the right course -- IT has one overarching goal (and it is not to support business). Technology is finally catching up with business and the IT organization finally realizing its real purpose is not to serve the business, but to lead with it.
Business challenges and priorities Best remembered as the father of modern management, Peter Drucker wrote that "there is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer. He went on to say "Businesses are not paid to reform customers, they are paid to satisfy customers."
Asia-Pacific is gearing up for competition in an increasingly global economy. And regardless what business you are in, all 618 respondents to Enterprise Innovation's survey agree that the customer remains the focus of attention with over 49 percent of responses believing that improving customer service delivery is of the highest priority (refer to Table 1).
"The degree of product differentiation is thinning these days and brand loyalty is harder to achieve with influx of numerous brands. Service is what differentiates leaders from laggards," says Lynette Low, Manager for Customer Delight Management, Canon Singapore. "People remember an experience and this is largely created when they interact with the people behind the brand. No matter how much one is impressed by an advertisement, it the final experience is bad, all good impressions generated from advertisements and public relations efforts are lost."
In this case the 'customer' is not just existing customers but the competition's customers as well. Business executives are diligently looking for every possible opportunity to turn a competitor's customer over to them even as they look for ways to protect their own customer base (and milk them for new opportunities -- also called cross-selling).
"Companies are all pretty familiar with the tiered approach for winning and keeping customers by moving them up the value chain, incrementally, through value added services. True service personalization comes when companies are able to rapidly configure and deliver hundreds of these smaller services -- at which point the value add becomes the service," says Gareth Senior, CEO and CTO for Axiom Systems.
To achieve both goals require companies to implement changes in the way they do business (42.0 percent). To achieve its top three priorities, management is under extreme pressure to come up with innovative new products and services (33.6 percent) and improve workforce productivity (28.1 percent).
While profitability remains a priority for many businesses, cost cutting plays a low 27.9 percent to businesses priorities -- sixth in importance among business and technology objectives. This lends credence to management understanding that cost is no longer a competitive advantage and must play a secondary role to generating new business.
Business continuity is still important (27.9 percent) for many businesses particularly those open in disaster prone markets such as Taiwan, Japan, and Indonesia. This also applies to markets like Thailand and the Philippines where disruption to business may come in the form of political or economic uncertainties. And as the cable disruption disaster that occurred in Taiwan in December 2006 shows, disruption in one market will impact those operating in other geographies.
Workforce collaboration is deemed less important than cost cutting and minimizing business disruption. This reflects market observation that many companies are unfamiliar with collaborative tools (more so than their Western counterparts). Asian businesses are inclined to invest in technology or processes that are new and unproven. Asia's business managers often take a wait-and-see approach in introducing solutions that may are seen as untested (particularly among their local peers).
IT management priorities are shifting
This is a recurring priority among senior IT executives that trickles down throughout the organization. CIOs are pressed to improve the performance and capabilities of the entire team (66.6 percent). Refer to Table 2.
"High-touch businesses have to adopt a number of technologies, and in some instances change the way they do things, to be able to respond faster to market. This may involve re-architecting the company's infrastructure so that customer service response is the same regardless of where the transaction takes place," says PK Lim, Managing Director, ASEAN / ANZ, Blue Coat Systems.
The CIO and his direct reports are also driven to meet the overall imperative of aligning IT with business objectives. The good news is that successful IT teams have shown this is possible. The bad news is that it requires a change in mindset as well as willingness to learn, adapt and be humble enough to accept other people's opinions.
Ann Livermore, executive vice president for the Technology Solutions Group at HP notes that "IT as we know it is over. The new reality is that technology doesn't just support the business -- technology powers the business and helps drive growth. The shift to business technology enables CIOs to weigh and measure their investments in terms of business outcomes -- whether it's managing risk, accelerating growth or lowering costs."
Companies are also more inclined to spend on technology and implement operational change (35 percent) if it means becoming more agile (nimble) and responsive to changes in the business environment.
Faced with the difficulty of identifying, hiring and retaining qualified staff, IT managers are more than happy to outsource non-strategic elements or work that can easily be outsourced without comprise to security and in-line with keeping costs down.
Technologies on high priority
Over 55 percent of survey respondents say that security (and continuity) remains the number one concern within the IT organization. (Refer to Table 3). Security-related spending is a mainstay of annual IT budgets with some companies now outsourcing their IT security needs to specialists.
As businesses adopt mobile technology to get closer to their customers, this exposes the inadequacies of present-day security policies and strategies to hostile elements. Ken Low, Security Marketing Director at TippingPoint observes that even as companies (of all sizes) grow in reliance on their networks, many aren't proactively doing something to improve their network security. "In a Gartner survey 60 percent of companies admit they don't have adequate security in their wireless environment. Add to this the widespread adoption of wireless connectivity options offered by a multitude of mobile devices, and the biggest threat might very well be your own employee, or even employees working in companies around you. This is just one tiny aspect of network security. If you consider the sophistication and velocity of malware and security threats out there that haven't been properly provisioned against, you will begin to realize how dire the situation can get, whether you're a large enterprise or an SMB," Low adds.
Greatest contributors to business
Present day business environments call for IT to get off its cost-center mentality and lead the way in identifying new opportunities. Among the best run organizations, IT staff are required to relocate to specific business units they are assigned to. In so doing, they become part of the business unit, and part of the team that draws and execute new products and services.
"Technology is an important differentiator in today's competitive business environment. New technologies enable businesses to stay competitive and venture into new markets while enabling innovation and resulting in improved productivity," says Kishore Kapoor, CEO, i-flex Solutions in Singapore.
Over 40 percent of respondents believe that business process management (BPM) is a strategic initiative in 2007 (see Table 4). Gartner points to the CIO as the person to take charge and be accountable for BPM related exercises.
According to Janelle Hill, research vice-president at Gartner "BPM wins the 'triple crown' of saving money, saving time and adding value. BPM is delivering both short-term ROI and long-term value. One example is an insurance company that was able to reduce its claims processing cost by more than 20 percent. We are currently seeing uptake in BPMS use and benefits in government, banking, healthcare, transportation and travel industries."
One man's security is another man's opportunity. Companies are not just investing in security they are telling customers that their security is very important. Customers are more inclined to do business with companies that take security very seriously.
According to Nick Small, Regional Director, Unisys Public Sector, Asia South: "Information security has over the past years transformed from being an internal issue, primarily localized to the IT Department, to a business priority and an opportunity for differentiation. In many industries sound information security has become a key marketing tool -- demonstrating to customers a commitment to securing their information and assets. But as information security improves, so do the capabilities of those that seek to overcome it. It is essential that information security solutions are continuously refreshed to address emerging threats and vulnerabilities -- thereby demonstrating to customers that they are protected."
A company's intellectual capital is still the least utilized asset within a company. Tapping this knowledge pool continues to be the subject of heated discussion as to industry best practices. Over 39% of senior executives participating in this survey understand the power that knowledge brings to the business and have prioritized it as such. Investments in business intelligence (BI) and data mining remain a continuing priority.
"Operational systems (such as ERP software) allow you to do things faster, while the BI solutions help you to think faster. Combining the two allows users to do, think and consequently act faster," said Chart Chai Chayavirabood, Director of Information Management at Avanade Asia.
Drucker warns that many organizations will continue to fail in this arena so long as the responsibility for how BI tools usage remain in the hands of the IT organization. "Most CEOs still believe that it is the job of the CIO to identify what information the CEO requires. This is a fallacy. The CIO is a tool maker. The CEO is the tool user," argues Drucker.
The survey shows that different companies have different priorities reflecting the varied interests in the types of technologies being considered, invested in, and deployed. What is clear is that technology is an integral element of the business operation and that IT is expected to not only solve crucial business problems but help identify and deliver innovative products and services. The company's survival depends on the successful integration and alignment of IT into the business.
Editor's note: For a complete list of the survey results, send your request to editor@enterpriseinnovation.net with the subject "2007 User Wants and Needs Survey".
Calif. Web Site Outsources Reporting - SMH - May 11 2007
The job posting was a head-scratcher: "We seek a newspaper journalist based in India to report on the city government and political scene of Pasadena, California, USA."
A reporter half a world away covering local street-light contracts and sewer repairs? A reporter who has never gotten closer to Pasadena than the telecast of the Rose Bowl parade?
Outsourcing first claimed manufacturing jobs, then hit services such as technical support, airline reservations and tax preparation. Now comes the next frontier: local journalism.
James Macpherson, editor and publisher of the two-year-old website pasadenanow.com, acknowledged it sounds strange to have journalists in India cover news in this wealthy city just outside Los Angeles.
But he said it can be done from afar now that weekly Pasadena City Council meetings can be watched over the Internet. And he said the idea makes business sense because of India's lower labour costs.
"I think it could be a significant way to increase the quality of journalism on the local level without the expense that is a major problem for local publications," said the 51-year-old Pasadena native. "Whether you're at a desk in Pasadena or a desk in Mumbai, you're still just a phone call or e-mail away from the interview."
The first articles, some of which will carry bylines, are slated to appear Friday.
The plan has its doubters.
"Nobody in their right mind would trust the reporting of people who not only don't know the institutions but aren't even there to witness the events and nuances," said Bryce Nelson, a University of Southern California journalism professor and Pasadena resident. "This is a truly sad picture of what American journalism could become."
It is a shaky business proposition as well, said Uday Karmarkar, a UCLA professor of technology and strategy who outsources copy editing and graphics work to Indian businesses. If the goal is sophisticated reporting, he said, Macpherson could end up spending more time editing than the labour savings are worth.
This is not the first time media jobs have been shipped to India.
The British news agency Reuters runs an operation in the technology capital of Bangalore that churns out Wall Street stories based on news releases.
Macpherson appears to be the first to outsource community journalism _ work that by definition has been done by reporters who walk the streets they cover.
Macphersons said his website, which he runs out of his house, gets about 45,000 unique readers per month but is not yet profitable. Up until now, his main help has consisted of his wife and an intern.
Macpherson posted the help-wanted ad Monday on the Indian edition of craigslist.org. Within days, he said, he had hired two Indian reporters, one a graduate of the journalism school at the University of California at Berkeley.
He wants them to broaden pasadenanow.com's content from news releases and event listings to analyses of issues before the council, and perhaps eventually to investigative reports.
Projected annual cost: $20,800 for the pair. Not bad wages for an Indian journalist and cheap by U.S. standards, especially if each one produces the expected 15 weekly articles.
Pasadena city spokeswoman Ann Erdman said coverage from afar shouldn't pose problems if the articles are well-edited. In any case, she said, "Local government is certainly not in the practice of dictating to local business who they can hire and where those employees should live."
Google has big plans for corporate services, expert says - ZDNet Aust. - May 14 2007
Google may be known as the Web search advertising company but it has big plans for offering services to corporations, says Stephen Arnold, author of The Google Legacy and a Google patent scrutiniser.
Arnold figures out possible tech company strategies by analysing their patents. He's come across several patent applications from Google that he says indicate that they plan to use the Google Search Appliance as much more than just a device that lets employees search for data within the internal network.
The Google Search Appliance is a "Trojan Horse" that will soon be able to do much more than just search, he said. He cites two patents, "Determination of a Desired Repositor" and "Programmable Search Engine," that he said make it possible to connect a Google Appliance into Google's datacentres, almost like a node on the network.
"This connection makes it possible for a licensee (Appliance user) to tap into the computational power and the applications running on Google's servers," he said in a statement expected to be released today in the US.
"Even more interesting is that a Google Appliance can send data to Google's servers for inclusion in new information products and charge users a fee for the access to this data." For example, a merchant could push its entire catalogue of products directly to Google through its Appliance, or a company could get video or other content directly from Google the same way. Multiple Appliance users could also exchange data with each other.
"Search is today's offering. Tomorrow it will be e-mail, enterprise applications, and a wide range of innovative partnerships to help Appliance licensees leverage information more effectively," he said."
Just as the Google Search Appliance is a form of outsourced corporate search, Google can position the Appliance as the IT department's helper, handling the research, word processing and other applications a company doesn't want to deal with in-house, he said.
The more applications that a corporation can have Google serve and manage through the "data cloud" -- as Google puts it -- the more money and resources a company can save. This seems to fit nicely with Google's own vision of its future as a Web-based apps provider. During Google's shareholder meeting on Thursday, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said the company is expanding beyond search and advertising.
"We're going to start using the phrase 'search, ads and apps' to define what we're trying to do," he told reporters before the meeting. "There is a big opportunity before us, which is to move to a new architectural platform ... based on the data in the cloud."
A Google spokesman provided this statement in response to Arnold's theory: "Protecting the privacy of information is paramount to Google. This is true of the Google Search Appliance and Google Mini. We have specifically not added features that might be misconstrued as communicating with Google.com, such as auto-update functionality or diagnostic reporting.
The Google Search Appliance and the Google Mini do not now, nor have they ever, connected to Google.com. We have no plans for these appliances to connect to Google's datacentres and any communication technology on the appliances is not intended for this purpose."
14.5.07
Google plans to profit by getting personal - SMH
May 14, 2007
Guardian News & Media
THE internet giant Google has plans to compile psychological profiles of millions of web users by covertly monitoring the way they play online games.
The company thinks it can glean information about an individual's preferences and personality type by tracking his or her online behaviour, which could then be sold to advertisers.
Details such as whether a person is more likely to be aggressive, hostile or dishonest could be stored for future use, it says.
The move is intended to customise advertisements shown to players of online video games by tailoring them to specific tastes and interests. But it has worried privacy campaigners who say the implications of compiling and storing such detailed information are alarming.
The plans are detailed in a patent filed by Google in Europe and the US last month. It says people playing online role-playing games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft would be good to target, because they interact with other players and make decisions that probably reflect their behaviour in real life.
The information could be used to make advertisements that appear inside the game more "relevant to the user", Google says.
Players who spend a lot of time exploring "may be interested in vacations, so the system may show ads for vacations". And those who spend more time talking to other characters will see advertisement for mobile phones.
The patent says Google could also monitor people playing on any game console that hooks up to the internet, including the Sony PlayStation, Nintendo Wii and Microsoft's Xbox. It says information could be retrieved from previous game details saved on memory cards.
Sue Charman, of the online campaign Open Rights Group, said: "I can understand why they are interested in this, but I would be deeply disturbed by a company holding a psychological profile."
"Whenever you have large amounts of information it becomes attractive to people - we've already seen the American Federal Government going to court over data from companies including Google."
Google said it did not have any plans to roll out the technology in the near future, and that it was just one of a large number of patents that it had filed in recent months.
Guardian News & Media
THE internet giant Google has plans to compile psychological profiles of millions of web users by covertly monitoring the way they play online games.
The company thinks it can glean information about an individual's preferences and personality type by tracking his or her online behaviour, which could then be sold to advertisers.
Details such as whether a person is more likely to be aggressive, hostile or dishonest could be stored for future use, it says.
The move is intended to customise advertisements shown to players of online video games by tailoring them to specific tastes and interests. But it has worried privacy campaigners who say the implications of compiling and storing such detailed information are alarming.
The plans are detailed in a patent filed by Google in Europe and the US last month. It says people playing online role-playing games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft would be good to target, because they interact with other players and make decisions that probably reflect their behaviour in real life.
The information could be used to make advertisements that appear inside the game more "relevant to the user", Google says.
Players who spend a lot of time exploring "may be interested in vacations, so the system may show ads for vacations". And those who spend more time talking to other characters will see advertisement for mobile phones.
The patent says Google could also monitor people playing on any game console that hooks up to the internet, including the Sony PlayStation, Nintendo Wii and Microsoft's Xbox. It says information could be retrieved from previous game details saved on memory cards.
Sue Charman, of the online campaign Open Rights Group, said: "I can understand why they are interested in this, but I would be deeply disturbed by a company holding a psychological profile."
"Whenever you have large amounts of information it becomes attractive to people - we've already seen the American Federal Government going to court over data from companies including Google."
Google said it did not have any plans to roll out the technology in the near future, and that it was just one of a large number of patents that it had filed in recent months.
Business Software - CRM BUZZ
Extend your CRM System to Your PR Department
CRM it's not just for sales, marketing and service anymore!
Many companies have come to recognize the value that customer relationship management (CRM) solutions can offer to sales and marketing operations. Improved productivity, reduced costs, higher win rates, and stronger customer relationships are just some of the many benefits that can be achieved. But few businesses realize that similar payback can be realized when CRM is applied to its public relations and media communications efforts.
Although the methods and end goals are quite different - sales and marketing staff are looking to reach out to existing and potential customers to generate revenue, while public relations professionals are reaching out to a variety of journalists to generate "ink" or garner airtime - PR departments function much in the same way that sales and marketing teams to.
They all identify and track opportunities. They all build and manage relationships with key contacts. They all measure their results. So, it makes perfect sense that the features within a CRM system can not only enhance the way sales and marketing teams work, it can also help PR groups to increase efficiency, boost success rates, and accelerate return on investment.
What are some of the ways CRM can enhance your public relations activities?
Media Contact Management
The typical PR professional manages hundreds of relationships with magazine editors, freelance writers, financial reporters, television and radio newscasters, and other contacts. And, as the Internet continues to emerge as the preferred method of outreach and communications, they must also conduct business with bloggers and other types of online journalists.
The contact management capabilities within a CRM system can enable your PR staff to more efficiently manage their key relationships and related activities - much in the same way they can help sales reps track their leads, prospects, and accounts.
For example, a CRM application can be used to build a comprehensive database of target print and online publications, as well as television and radio news programs, complete with demographics, and the editors, writers, or reporters associated with those vehicles. Each publication or channel can be assigned to an appropriate manager within your PR organization, and all pitches, outreach attempts, and other tasks can be easily scheduled and tracked, to ensure that each contact is being worked as effectively as possible.
Opportunity Monitoring
Understanding what editors are looking for, and offering them a compelling and relevant article or story is the key to getting press coverage. That's why PR managers and their staff members spend countless hours reviewing media calendars and newsletter schedules, looking for opportunities to pitch a winning story.
With a customer relationship management application, your PR team can uncover these opportunities faster. Potential topic matches, gathered from media calendars, can be entered into the database as activities, with calls to the editor or writer scheduled in advance of the publication close date. This will enable your PR staff to stay on top of critical deadlines, and if the story is picked up, coordinate the needed resources such as writers or company executives that need to be interviewed. And, all correspondence can be logged, so managers can accurately track and follow the status of each opportunity.
Automated Workflow and Routing
CRM systems can automate lead handling - routing new leads to the appropriate sales reps based on industry expertise, territory, or other business rules, or dynamically triggering a specific follow-up, such as an email, to a campaign response. With customer relationship management, your PR-related workflows can be fully automated in the same fashion. For example, a byline or other story can be automatically assigned to a staff writer or third-party freelance writer, based on experience. Or, follow-up emails to editors can be sent automatically once the pitch has been made.
Customer Testimonials
Every PR professional knows that nothing gets the attention of an editor faster than a marquee-name customer who's willing to share their story with the media. That's why most PR departments maintain a list of customers who have agreed to speak publicly about their experience with the company's products or services, and advocate on the company's behalf.
With a CRM solution, this list can be more effectively maintained, and related opportunities can be more rapidly uncovered. For example, one of your PR managers can easily search through the CRM database for those customers who have the specific characteristics or meet the criteria outlined by the editor.
Additionally, CRM can enable your PR team keep track of how often customers are used for media opportunities. This will help prevent your customers and their stories from being "overused", and allow you to identify those "preferred" customer who are most cooperative and contribute the most value to your PR efforts.
Results Tracking
Like many organizations, you've probably hired a third party "clipping service" to track your press coverage, airtime, and online pick-ups. While these service providers can deliver basic coverage reports and hard copies of any articles that appeared, as well as any "ink" your competitors have received, they don't provide true in-depth insight into how successful your PR initiatives really are.
With your customer relationship management package, your PR team can add clipping and airtime information to the database. Staff members can then create a series of key performance indicators and related metrics, such as the ratio of pitches to actual pick-ups, ratio of positive to negative mentions, and success rates by media type, and measure them on a regular basis.
And, most importantly, you'll want your public relations staff to work hand-in-hand with your marketing organization, to monitor and report on the impact that PR programs have on lead generation. For example, a mention in a high-profile magazine or on a popular radio show can lead to a rise in sales inquiries and Web site hits. Any pipeline deals and revenue that are the direct result of press coverage or airtime should be closely tracked, to effectively assess the return on your public relations investment.
There are many PR management-type applications on the market today. However, these solutions are often designed for individual users, and don't provide the same breadth of functionality as customer relationship management packages do. Additionally, since public relations efforts are so closely linked to marketing programs - and ultimately, to sales activities - it is far wiser for PR teams to utilize a solution that ties together all three departments, instead of leaving PR to operate as an "island".
10.5.07
Joining Forces - Special Report - IT & Marketing
By Patrick Gray
Published: Tuesday, May 01, 2007 MIS Magazine (Financial Review)
They were once strange bedfellows, but now techies and marketers are becoming a hot item, Patrick Gray discovers
Marketing can be as baffling to IT professionals as technology is to marketing experts. Let's face it, these two industries have been engaged in a battle for jargon supremacy for years.
While our dear chief information officers get excited about end-to-end solutions, service-oriented architecture, web services, converged communications and storage-area networks, marketing managers have a lingo all their own: repertory-grid method, Porter's five forces and face validity to name a few of the most confusing expressions.
However, these two fields are merging. Marketing, whether driven by telephone, email, web or through advertising, is increasingly a technology-dependent discipline. The affect that is having on organisational structures is becoming clearer: marketing and technology have to spend more time understanding and working with each other.
Food giant Nestlé Australia takes its marketing seriously. Mass marketing drives its business, so managing its brand and marketing assets effectively and uniformly is a must. Now, in the middle of a marketing resource management (MRM) upgrade, Nelson Leong, Nestlé Australia's visual identity manager, describes how technology enables his team to do its job.
"In terms of marketing, we have tonnes and tonnes of data. Research about consumer insights, the state of the market, information about the media, information about the material that you need to put on to the media, be it television, radio, print, press or packaging and design collateral. That's a hell of a lot of communications assets," Leong told MIS.
He says MRM is a digital way of managing the work flow and the data through its capture, for example, image libraries and storage systems, and then looking at decomposing the work-flow process that happens within a marketing unit and speeding up the process.
Combine this with analytics that tell marketers how long jobs have taken, whether stakeholders have engaged properly, whether all stakeholders have approved the correct processes in a timely manner, and the ability to correct glitches in work flow, and you have a system that makes life much easier for marketers. However, Leong doesn't regard the implementation of the system as a technology project: it's driven by the business, for the business. While IT plays a supporting role, the marketing boffins determine the project's scope and direction.
"It's not a technology project. The technology side is quite discreet. It's in the background. What makes it usable and invaluable to the users is it's referenced to them in their language and according to their methodologies. It needs to feel familiar to them and it has to be written in their terms and in ways that they understand it. Not just out of this office, but globally," he says.
It was Nestlé's e-business group, which has a foot in both camps, that seeded the initiative. "They're the ones who drove the project and presented at a board level and convinced the organisations to acquire," Leong says.
The company will deploy software from MRM vendor Aprimo. Analysis and research firm Gartner says MRM is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 16 per cent, and forecasts "rapid" growth in the technology's uptake over the next five years.
The success of Nestlé's e-business group in spanning multiple disciplines suggests ties between technology and marketing disciplines will only deepen in the future, Leong says.
"[There are] differences between merely having a web presence and an e-business strategy. E-business strategy is quite deep, it's thorough, it goes to the very heart of an organisation," he says.
If anything, marketers and IT heads are even starting to tread on each others' toes, with positive results for business. Marketing groups within Nestlé have previously approached the technology group to ask it to develop a tool, Leong says, only to find out it was already in the works.
Like Nestlé, Virgin Blue has an e-commerce group that straddles technology and marketing. Formal contact with the marketing area comes via a dedicated IT account manager who works across sales, marketing and the company's Velocity reward program.
It's important to keep the communication lines open, says David Harvey, the airline's general manager of IT.
The technology group also keeps an eye on technical resources various areas of the business seek to access.
For example, one part of the business may want to extract large volumes of data from the airline's reservations database, which isn't a problem, unless there's a cheap fare sale on.
"We're doing a big sale and people might want to draw data for mining. We have a team that looks after the reservations platform and they know who in the business is likely to be the big users," he says.
Virgin Blue's technology and marketing agenda consists of developing a customer relationship management strategy.
"We're trying to understand the value proposition of an integrated CRM solution as opposed to putting in lots of point solutions," Harvey says.
"There are more business questions in this than technology questions. Who owns the customer? Who co-ordinates contact with the customer? They're all business questions."
Using point solutions has its appeal, Harvey says, but the business may then end up with a disparate view of the customers spread across applications and databases. The key driver is to get a single view of customers so they can do any segmentation of the individual customer to find out specific information and then align communication to that customer between the groups.
A fragmented CRM deployment could wreak havoc on Virgin Blue's customers due to the disconnect between its marketing department and its Velocity frequent flyer program. It's a scenario Harvey is keen to avoid. However, the introduction of complicated, unified CRM comes with its own pitfalls, so options must be carefully weighed.
"If it's split off, you can have Velocity communicating one thing at one time and marketing doing something else at the same time and, at the end of the day, the poor customer is sitting there getting swamped by emails," he says.
"CRM solutions aren't cheap and aren't easy to implement. So we're going through that rigour at the moment of just how much we can bite off. What's our business ready for?"
Over at Nestlé, Leong says the marketing department has a dedicated CRM expert on staff.
"They developed a policy approach, put a proposal forward to the heads of marketing and said, 'this is what we think we can achieve, this is the objective, here's how we build the database and here's what the benefits of that database will be to you, and why and how we mine that information'," he says.
Chief of research Asia-Pacific for Gartner , John Roberts, says CRM and business intelligence will continue to play a vital role in marketing in 2007.
"Business intelligence is among the highest priorities for CIOs this year in our survey," Roberts says, adding now defunct experiments with data warehousing have helped hone technology.
"There was a great failure rate on data warehouses because it's very easy to put data in warehouses. Intelligently taking it out is a whole lot more difficult," he says.
"Then business intelligence came along with the smarter reporting tools and I think the maturity of business intelligence is only now starting to emerge in those organisations that really want it."
Business intelligence is now being driven from the top, Roberts explains, and the increasing savvy of business people in all disciplines means they're the ones determining technology-enabled strategy.
"It's being driven from a top-down perspective. The success factor is that it is very much driven by business management, be it marketing managers or whatever else," Roberts says. Tweaking the systemCustomer relationship management has turned out to be vital to West Australian-based charity Rocky Bay's marketing arm, and despite its lack of dedicated IT resources, the sky hasn't fallen in. As it turns out, users can handle running their own CRM these days.
The organisation, which receives government funding, provides care for children and young adults with neuromuscular disabilities. But government dollars only go so far, so Rocky Bay assembled a telemarketing group to sell raffle tickets.
"We're in marketing here," says telemarketing supervisor Julie-Ann Sugar. " The money that we raise here is vital to keep a number of our houses operational."
She estimates her group of 11 part-time telemarketers raises about $110,000 a year for Rocky Bay. It's not mega-dollars, but it helps, Sugar says. "For a little group, that's pretty good."
Over time, Rocky Bay's database has grown to host 200,000 records. Managing those contacts correctly is vital, not only to stay compliant with direct marketing regulations, but to make the best use of her team's time.
However, it's the management of Rocky Bay's Goldmine CRM system that's interesting. Sugar, who is by no means a technology expert, runs the whole system. "I'm a jack of all trades and a master of none," she says.
Despite her self-confessed lack of technical skills, it's Sugar's job to tweak the Goldmine system, implement new processes used by the call-centre staff, manage the database and generally oversee the operation of what has evolved into a sophisticated implementation.
"We've had to modify some of the processes, we're starting now to tweak it a bit more," she says.
Even a few years ago, sophisticated, process-driven CRM for call centres was the domain of technical experts. Yet Sugar is now capable of adding functionality to the system herself. "We do go through some hiccups every now and then, but you've just got to sit through it logically," she says.
Published: Tuesday, May 01, 2007 MIS Magazine (Financial Review)
They were once strange bedfellows, but now techies and marketers are becoming a hot item, Patrick Gray discovers
Marketing can be as baffling to IT professionals as technology is to marketing experts. Let's face it, these two industries have been engaged in a battle for jargon supremacy for years.
While our dear chief information officers get excited about end-to-end solutions, service-oriented architecture, web services, converged communications and storage-area networks, marketing managers have a lingo all their own: repertory-grid method, Porter's five forces and face validity to name a few of the most confusing expressions.
However, these two fields are merging. Marketing, whether driven by telephone, email, web or through advertising, is increasingly a technology-dependent discipline. The affect that is having on organisational structures is becoming clearer: marketing and technology have to spend more time understanding and working with each other.
Food giant Nestlé Australia takes its marketing seriously. Mass marketing drives its business, so managing its brand and marketing assets effectively and uniformly is a must. Now, in the middle of a marketing resource management (MRM) upgrade, Nelson Leong, Nestlé Australia's visual identity manager, describes how technology enables his team to do its job.
"In terms of marketing, we have tonnes and tonnes of data. Research about consumer insights, the state of the market, information about the media, information about the material that you need to put on to the media, be it television, radio, print, press or packaging and design collateral. That's a hell of a lot of communications assets," Leong told MIS.
He says MRM is a digital way of managing the work flow and the data through its capture, for example, image libraries and storage systems, and then looking at decomposing the work-flow process that happens within a marketing unit and speeding up the process.
Combine this with analytics that tell marketers how long jobs have taken, whether stakeholders have engaged properly, whether all stakeholders have approved the correct processes in a timely manner, and the ability to correct glitches in work flow, and you have a system that makes life much easier for marketers. However, Leong doesn't regard the implementation of the system as a technology project: it's driven by the business, for the business. While IT plays a supporting role, the marketing boffins determine the project's scope and direction.
"It's not a technology project. The technology side is quite discreet. It's in the background. What makes it usable and invaluable to the users is it's referenced to them in their language and according to their methodologies. It needs to feel familiar to them and it has to be written in their terms and in ways that they understand it. Not just out of this office, but globally," he says.
It was Nestlé's e-business group, which has a foot in both camps, that seeded the initiative. "They're the ones who drove the project and presented at a board level and convinced the organisations to acquire," Leong says.
The company will deploy software from MRM vendor Aprimo. Analysis and research firm Gartner says MRM is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 16 per cent, and forecasts "rapid" growth in the technology's uptake over the next five years.
The success of Nestlé's e-business group in spanning multiple disciplines suggests ties between technology and marketing disciplines will only deepen in the future, Leong says.
"[There are] differences between merely having a web presence and an e-business strategy. E-business strategy is quite deep, it's thorough, it goes to the very heart of an organisation," he says.
If anything, marketers and IT heads are even starting to tread on each others' toes, with positive results for business. Marketing groups within Nestlé have previously approached the technology group to ask it to develop a tool, Leong says, only to find out it was already in the works.
Like Nestlé, Virgin Blue has an e-commerce group that straddles technology and marketing. Formal contact with the marketing area comes via a dedicated IT account manager who works across sales, marketing and the company's Velocity reward program.
It's important to keep the communication lines open, says David Harvey, the airline's general manager of IT.
The technology group also keeps an eye on technical resources various areas of the business seek to access.
For example, one part of the business may want to extract large volumes of data from the airline's reservations database, which isn't a problem, unless there's a cheap fare sale on.
"We're doing a big sale and people might want to draw data for mining. We have a team that looks after the reservations platform and they know who in the business is likely to be the big users," he says.
Virgin Blue's technology and marketing agenda consists of developing a customer relationship management strategy.
"We're trying to understand the value proposition of an integrated CRM solution as opposed to putting in lots of point solutions," Harvey says.
"There are more business questions in this than technology questions. Who owns the customer? Who co-ordinates contact with the customer? They're all business questions."
Using point solutions has its appeal, Harvey says, but the business may then end up with a disparate view of the customers spread across applications and databases. The key driver is to get a single view of customers so they can do any segmentation of the individual customer to find out specific information and then align communication to that customer between the groups.
A fragmented CRM deployment could wreak havoc on Virgin Blue's customers due to the disconnect between its marketing department and its Velocity frequent flyer program. It's a scenario Harvey is keen to avoid. However, the introduction of complicated, unified CRM comes with its own pitfalls, so options must be carefully weighed.
"If it's split off, you can have Velocity communicating one thing at one time and marketing doing something else at the same time and, at the end of the day, the poor customer is sitting there getting swamped by emails," he says.
"CRM solutions aren't cheap and aren't easy to implement. So we're going through that rigour at the moment of just how much we can bite off. What's our business ready for?"
Over at Nestlé, Leong says the marketing department has a dedicated CRM expert on staff.
"They developed a policy approach, put a proposal forward to the heads of marketing and said, 'this is what we think we can achieve, this is the objective, here's how we build the database and here's what the benefits of that database will be to you, and why and how we mine that information'," he says.
Chief of research Asia-Pacific for Gartner , John Roberts, says CRM and business intelligence will continue to play a vital role in marketing in 2007.
"Business intelligence is among the highest priorities for CIOs this year in our survey," Roberts says, adding now defunct experiments with data warehousing have helped hone technology.
"There was a great failure rate on data warehouses because it's very easy to put data in warehouses. Intelligently taking it out is a whole lot more difficult," he says.
"Then business intelligence came along with the smarter reporting tools and I think the maturity of business intelligence is only now starting to emerge in those organisations that really want it."
Business intelligence is now being driven from the top, Roberts explains, and the increasing savvy of business people in all disciplines means they're the ones determining technology-enabled strategy.
"It's being driven from a top-down perspective. The success factor is that it is very much driven by business management, be it marketing managers or whatever else," Roberts says. Tweaking the systemCustomer relationship management has turned out to be vital to West Australian-based charity Rocky Bay's marketing arm, and despite its lack of dedicated IT resources, the sky hasn't fallen in. As it turns out, users can handle running their own CRM these days.
The organisation, which receives government funding, provides care for children and young adults with neuromuscular disabilities. But government dollars only go so far, so Rocky Bay assembled a telemarketing group to sell raffle tickets.
"We're in marketing here," says telemarketing supervisor Julie-Ann Sugar. " The money that we raise here is vital to keep a number of our houses operational."
She estimates her group of 11 part-time telemarketers raises about $110,000 a year for Rocky Bay. It's not mega-dollars, but it helps, Sugar says. "For a little group, that's pretty good."
Over time, Rocky Bay's database has grown to host 200,000 records. Managing those contacts correctly is vital, not only to stay compliant with direct marketing regulations, but to make the best use of her team's time.
However, it's the management of Rocky Bay's Goldmine CRM system that's interesting. Sugar, who is by no means a technology expert, runs the whole system. "I'm a jack of all trades and a master of none," she says.
Despite her self-confessed lack of technical skills, it's Sugar's job to tweak the Goldmine system, implement new processes used by the call-centre staff, manage the database and generally oversee the operation of what has evolved into a sophisticated implementation.
"We've had to modify some of the processes, we're starting now to tweak it a bit more," she says.
Even a few years ago, sophisticated, process-driven CRM for call centres was the domain of technical experts. Yet Sugar is now capable of adding functionality to the system herself. "We do go through some hiccups every now and then, but you've just got to sit through it logically," she says.
9.5.07
CeBIT TV - Interview with Sqware Peg - CeBIT 2007
Interview with Will Scully-Power - General Manager - agency On-Demand®
and Shawn Stilwell - Managing Director - Sqware Peg
Please Click Here to watch the interview
and Shawn Stilwell - Managing Director - Sqware Peg
Please Click Here to watch the interview
No More Dying by Inches
To help reverse the effects of its information malnutrition, a sales team must let its marketing department know what customer data is of value and what is not.
by Marshall LagerFrom CRM Magazine May 2007
Sales is a banquet, to paraphrase Mame Dennis, and most poor suckers are starving to death. Marketing collects tons of information on leads, pats itself on the back, and throws that data over the wall to the sales team. Frequently the sales team cannot use it, and this state of affairs leads to animosity between two important realms of a business, lost opportunities for both departments, and a sense of detachment that ranges from the customer to the executive suite.
"The underlying problem is the lack of coordination that plagues the opportunity management process," says Robert Bois, research director at AMR Research. "People assumed CRM would fix this, but it hasn't; sales and marketing don't speak the same language. Sales...isn't starving--it's suffering from malnutrition. There are plenty of fresh vegetables in the house, but they're still eating Cheetos."
by Marshall LagerFrom CRM Magazine May 2007
Sales is a banquet, to paraphrase Mame Dennis, and most poor suckers are starving to death. Marketing collects tons of information on leads, pats itself on the back, and throws that data over the wall to the sales team. Frequently the sales team cannot use it, and this state of affairs leads to animosity between two important realms of a business, lost opportunities for both departments, and a sense of detachment that ranges from the customer to the executive suite.
"The underlying problem is the lack of coordination that plagues the opportunity management process," says Robert Bois, research director at AMR Research. "People assumed CRM would fix this, but it hasn't; sales and marketing don't speak the same language. Sales...isn't starving--it's suffering from malnutrition. There are plenty of fresh vegetables in the house, but they're still eating Cheetos."
Salesforce.com Announces First-Ever Developer Conference
7 May 2007
SAN FRANCISCO, May 7 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the market and technology leader in on-demand business services, today announced the first-ever Salesforce Developer Conference, designed to foster the next generation of on-demand applications and businesses. Attendees will hear from and network with industry visionaries, such as Guy Kawasaki, Managing Director, Garage Ventures, Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com, and Parker Harris, co-founder and EVP Technology, salesforce.com. The Salesforce Developer Conference will be held May 21, 2007 at the Santa Clara Marriott.
(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20050216/SFW105LOGO )
The conference will provide developers the opportunity to get hands-on with the Salesforce Platform and the Apex programming language, as well as the opportunity to meet with salesforce.com's platform R&D and AppExchange teams. Attendees will be able to attend tracks and sessions to learn how to build a global business with on-demand applications. Tracks at the Salesforce Developer Conference will include:
-- Salesforce Platform: Learn directly from salesforce.com technology experts as they discuss how to build robust on-demand apps on the Salesforce Platform
-- Enterprise Mashups: Learn to extend on-demand applications by leveraging leading Web Services APIs
-- On-Demand Startups: Go from idea to cash using the Salesforce Platform and the AppExchange
For more information on sessions, speakers and tracks, or to register, please visit: http://www.salesforce.com/campaigns/developerconference/.
An audio webcast of Mr. Benioff's keynote will be available on salesforce.com's website at http://www.salesforce.com/investor.
Create and Build On Demand with the Salesforce Developer Network
Comprehensive developer resources to build on the Salesforce Platform are available at a new Wiki-based developer site, the Salesforce Developer Network, at http://developer.salesforce.com. The Salesforce Developer Network provides the community, tools and resources to let developers use the Apex programming language to build new applications for the AppExchange. Now any developer in the world -- with access to just a Web browser and Internet connection -- can harness the power of the world's most popular multi-tenant platform to create new applications and mashups from scratch. With toolkits and resources for most popular development languages, including AJAX, Flex, Java, .NET and PHP, developers can also combine those applications with other Web services to create new business mashups, allowing developers, ISVs and IT organizations to easily leverage The Business Web in their projects and offerings.
Developers interested in using the toolkits and the Salesforce Platform can sign up for a free Developer Edition at http://developer.salesforce.com.
About salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is the market and technology leader in on-demand business services. The company's Salesforce suite of on-demand CRM applications allows customers to manage and share all of their sales, support, marketing and partner information on-demand. The Salesforce Platform enables customers, developers and partners to build powerful new on-demand applications that extend beyond CRM to deliver the benefits of multi-tenancy and The Business Web across the enterprise. All new components and applications built on the Salesforce Platform can be easily shared, exchanged and installed via salesforce.com's AppExchange directory, available at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange. Customers can also take advantage of Successforce, salesforce.com's world-class training, support, consulting and best practices offerings.
As of January 31, 2007, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 29,800 customers and approximately 646,000 paying subscribers including Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), America Online (AOL), Avis Budget Group, Inc, Dow Jones Newswires, Polycom and SunTrust Banks. Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce.com has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "CRM". For more information please visit http://www.salesforce.com, or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.
Salesforce.com is a registered trademark of salesforce.com, and AppExchange, The Business Web, IdeaExchange and Successforce are trademarks of salesforce.com, Inc., San Francisco, California. Other names used may be trademarks of their respective owners.
SOURCE salesforce.com, Inc.05/07/2007/CONTACT: David Havlek, Investor Relations, +1-415-536-2171,dhavlek@salesforce.com, or Gordon Evans, Public Relations, +1-415-536-7608,gevans@salesforce.com, for Salesforce.comWeb site: http://www.salesforce.com(CRM)
"Safe Harbor" Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995: Statements in this press release regarding salesforce.com's business which are not historical facts are "forward-looking statements" that involve risks and uncertainties. For a discussion of such risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements, see "Risk Factors" in the Company's Annual Report or Form 10-K for the most recently ended fiscal year.
Software high-flyer takes act of God in its stride - The Age
Eight years after its inception, Salesforce.com is on track for the big boys' league, writes Brad Howarth.
May 8 2007
NOT even an earthquake that severed undersea internet cables off the coast of Taiwan was sufficient to slow the momentum of internet-based software supplier Salesforce.com.
The company, which makes software for managing customer relationships that clients access over the internet, reports it did not lose a single client as a result of the earthquake on December 26, 2006, that brought some internet services in China to a standstill.
According to the company's president, Jim Steele, while these acts of God do cause disruption for users of so-called on-demand software suppliers such as Salesforce.com, the heavy reliance that many companies have on the internet means even those that run their software within their own premises are not exempt from problems.
"(Internet availability) is an issue, but on average the internet has been pretty accessible and pretty reliable overall," Mr Steele says. "We are the virtual IT (department) for all of our customers, and we have to meet the most demanding customer's requirements."
He says customers rarely publicise when they have suffered problems themselves due to natural disasters, external failures or internal errors.
While all customer data is currently hosted at Salesforce.com's US data centre, Mr Steele says the company is considering creating two new data centres in Asia and Europe.
"It's not necessarily about performance...but there could be companies that say, 'We don't want our data in the US', for whatever reason," he says.
New data centres would mark another step in the evolution of the company, which was founded in an apartment in San Francisco eight years ago as a developer of customer relationship management (CRM) software. It subsequently pioneered the on-demand software delivery model, and now has 30,000 customers and 646,000 users. In Australia it employs 65 people and has more than 1000 clients.
About two years ago, in response to pressure from customers such as Cisco and Merrill Lynch, Salesforce.com began allowing other developers to build complementary software products that could also be delivered on demand, creating what it calls the AppExchange.
"There is no one that is offering a platform like this," Mr Steele says. "We've created a new market with AppExchange, and whenever we get into a battle with a large company over CRM, our differentiator becomes our platform."
While Salesforce.com originally required all clients to purchase a licence for its CRM software, six months ago it created a second class of licence for those users that wanted to only access software from other developers through the AppExchange. The financial services company Morgan Stanley, for instance, has bought 700 AppExchange platform licences for using another company's recruitment application. Mr Steele says Salesforce.com makes money by charging a percentage of what its AppExchange partners sell.
According to the analyst company Gartner, the market for on-demand software reached $US6.3 billion ($A7.7 billion) in 2006, and is forecast to grow to $US19.3 billion by 2011.
While Salesforce.com's success has drawn CRM competitors such as Oracle, SAP and Microsoft to begin offering on-demand CRM software, it has also helped pave the way for other on-demand applications from companies such as Num Sum and Google, which now has several internet-based applications available.
However, Mr Steele does not believe that Google is likely to become a competitor in the business market.
"We've spent a lot of time with Google - their model comes from the consumer side of things, and they are driving the advertising dollars," Mr Steele says. "But in the enterprise it is a different story. They are going to learn a lot as they get into Google Apps and realise that enterprise requires a lot more support."
A month ago the company announced it had developed a version of its software specifically for the financial services industry: a customised wealth management workstation.
"(Company chief executive) Marc Benioff's vision is nothing short of being the trusted platform for managing and sharing information in an enterprise, on demand," Mr Steele says. "Our opportunity is to be the Microsoft of the on-demand era. We want to be one of the big boys."
News Release: Software & Information Industry Association Honors Salesforce.com
salesforce.com has added a news release to its Investor Relations Website.
Title: Software and Information Industry Association Honors Salesforce.com With CODiE Awards for best On-Demand Platform and Best Customer Relationship Management Solution.
Date: 1/5/2007
For a complete listing of salesforce.com News Releases, please click here
News Seekers turning to online search engines, videos and blogs
US news-seekers are increasingly turning to Internet search engines, video clips and gossip-slingers to sate curiosity about current events, according to a study released Tuesday. Read more...
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