Face IT – IESE Technology Blog
IT's all about business
Web/Tech
Using Twitter for Business
Aug 11th
A few months ago I did a short post on this blog about the research study on the enterprise use of social media for external collaboration that we are currently running. While the study in still in progress and I cannot report any of the detailed findings, one thing is pretty clear – the number of businesses that have started experimenting with social media, and Twitter in particular, continues to grow; yet for most this very much remains a trial and error process.
On numerous occasions, both during the study interviews and in my teaching, I’ve been asked questions about how firms should go about using Twitter for business purposes (Twitter just happened to be the hottest social media platform of the year). And so, in this post I decided to pull together various resources concerning this very issue. In the future, as I come across more useful links I will add them to this list. Also, once our research is complete, I will add insights from the study as well.
- Let’s start with the official guide. On July 23rd, Twitter for the first time launched a Twitter 101 Guide for business. The guide provides a quick overview of how to get started on Twitter along with a list of best business practices and a few case studies.
- The Twitter Guide Book by Mashable – Mashable provides a collection of blog posts (many of which are accompanied by helpful follow-up comments) on a wide range of topics related to the use of Twitter. The posts are organized by categories, such as Getting Started on Twitter, Twitter for Business, Building your Twitter Community etc., which makes them easy to navigate. The book is now also available for download.
- Web Clients for Twitter – Orli Yakuel, a guest author at TechCrunch, breaks down the pros and cons of various web interfaces for accessing Twitter. Since using the service for business purposes often requires additional features on top of those of the native Twitter interface (such as, multi-account support, retweets, channels etc.), Orli’s analysis will come in handy when choosing a client that fits your company’s needs best.
- 4 Ways Brands are Earning – and Buying – Followers on Twitter – Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester takes a stab at the one-million question of any business getting started on Twitter – how to attract and retain followers. The four strategies identified in the post may strike you as somewhat obvious. But they do a good job at capturing the range of practices that currently existing on Twitter and provide a good starting point for devising your own approach. Once again, pay attention to the follow up comments – these are often as insightful as the blog post itself.
- Types of Twitter Profiles – in another recent post, Jeremiah Owyang classifies different types of twitter profiles with respect to their focus on personal or corporate representation. Again, this is a common dilemma for businesses as the use of Twitter, as well as other social media platforms, often blurs the boundary between personal and corporate. Brands, Jeremiah suggests, should employ a combination of different Twitter profiles and provide internal coordination to ensure complete high-quality user experience.
- One last idea – during the study we’ve seen several examples where firms, usually smaller ones, encourage personal use of Twitter by employees in order to develop first-hand experience with the platform. Seems like a good idea to me.
The future of office printing
Jul 16th
As far as consumers are concerned, before Amazon’s Kindle arrived, the last time printing had been considered high technology had been around 15th century, the time of Johannes Gutenberg. Today people seem to be reading mostly from screens, be it mobile, desktop or Kindle screens. Declining newspaper sales are merely the most visible reflection of a larger trend: the days when people read things on paper seem all but counted and digital is king.
That is, unless you happen to be in charge of your company’s printing operations. Gartner estimates that between 1% and 3% of an organization’s revenues are spent on print. Think about the last time you went to a meeting and needed to print out meeting notes for everyone to keep everybody on the same page—literally. And what happens to these notes after the meeting? Many of them end up in the trash bin. In fact, according to Xerox, 40% of documents that are printed in the office are only viewed once. That is a huge waste, not to mention that it’s environmentally unfriendly.
While Kindle and other electronic readers are surely useful for books and newspapers, people still prefer to read many documents from paper. This is a major reason why the promised revolution in corporate workflow where electronic documents (say, in the form of PDF files) would be created and shared without the need to print them out, despite much hype, has not materialized.
So instead of changing people to wean them off paper, some are trying to change the paper itself. Xerox for one has been working on what it calls “erasable paper”. A special printer would print on special paper, and the printed image would disappear by itself in 16—24 hours, or be erased immediately by heating it, after which the paper can be reused. Separately, a team from Northwestern University is working on plastic-sheet “paper” that allows printing in color and defining the time after which the image disappears.
Neither technology is yet available commercially and their prices are unknown, so the economics of their use compared to traditional paper cannot be estimated. But if and when these technologies come about, the need for shredders and dedicated paper recycling bins would fade away, much like the text on the erasable paper.
Facebook: Is it the new Google or the new Microsoft?
Jun 30th
The latest edition of Wired is carrying an extremely interesting article on Facebook and its plans to dominate the Internet, comparing it with Google. I think that albeit the comparison is fair, it is missing a third –probably more relevant-player: Microsoft.
We all know that the social network is pursuing the aim of putting the users’ social networks at the center of all they do online, and then try to monetize on top of that via highly effective marketing campaigns. We have also seen how that had to push back on both their Beacon initiative –injecting personalized advertising to users-, as well as on their attempt to change of terms of service to a perpetual ownership of user data. And we are probably all very aware that there is more to come. That’s why everybody these days compares Facebook and Google.
Having a huge user base, and sitting on tons of very personalized data is fine only if monetization is possible, and up until now it still remains to be seen how this will happen. Privacy issues seem to be simply too powerful.
But while Facebook’s efforts into highly targeted online advertising have received a lot of attention, their activities in the applications spaces have been less commented. The launch of Connect has allowed them to integrate more than 10.000 independent sites into the Facebook community. And just two months ago, it announced the Open Stream API. Both of the initiatives are a step towards becoming the platform for all personal interaction on the Internet. And this is indeed interesting. If Faacebook becomes the de facto platform for us users to place our data, and for third parties to develop applications that hook us to their sites, then Facebook may well become one of the gatekeepers of the Internet.
And we should not forget that gatekeepers normally have an extremely profitable business model. We’ve seen that for decades with Microsoft. So, will Facebook become the new Microsoft?
Decision-making assisted by a website
Jun 16th
Hunch.com, a service that is supposed to aid in making decisions, was made public yesterday. With it, a question (”should I start my own business?”) will get a pleasantly definitive answer (yes/no) after you are guided through several questions (it also profiles you first to give better answers). The topics and guiding questions are added and modified by users.
For me the interesting thing was not as much the answer that I eventually got (yes), but the different dimensions of my question it made me think about with those guiding questions. Will give it a try next time I wnat to get the first feel of an issue.
Wolfram Alpha
Jun 2nd
Right before Microsoft’s Bing was announced, another new search-related website was getting the spotlight, WolframAlpha.com. Wolfram Alpha was created by Stephen Wolfram, who is also the creator of the highly respected
research focused application, Mathematica.
While this new website has received quite a bit of attention recently, many people still seem to be somewhat confused about how it works. A lot of this confusion is probably sue to the fact that many people are calling the system a “search engine,” but that is not really what it is. A more appropriate label might be a knowledge or “information engine.”
Wolfram Alpha lets you type in natural language questions, which it then tries to use basic public data to calculate an answer with. Wolfram and his team created a number of scripts that handle different types of questions by collecting, aggregating, and presenting a report of related data in an attempt to answer the questions.
Unfortunately, users must learn the forms of questions that Wolfram Alpha can process, and at this time, it is still fairly limited. However, once its limitations are understood, it can be used very effectively to perform calculations, and summarize recent factual data (such as “What is the population of…”). One of its advantages is that it will look for the latest data on a subject, which is something that may take time to find in a Google search, and may be out of date on a knowledge database such as Wikipedia. So, users of Wolfram Alpha have the advantage of not having to click through multiple sites compared to Google as well as potentially having more recent data than Wikipedia.
One of the big questions is how Wolfram Alpha plans to make money. One potential answer is that because its tools are very effective at summarizing relevant data, many organizations may want to use it in their internal data warehouses, or to produce hybrid reports using internal and external data. Wolfram Alpha may charge for custom uses of the system such as this. Also, the site has posted its first banner ad, for Lenovo. Whether it will advance this model to include Google-style targeted ads based on the search terms remains to be seen.
Since Wolfram Alpha is a totally different type of tool, it will not likely compete directly with Google in the near future. It may become the go-to tool for finding simple, quantitative information about subjects that have publically available data on the web, but it will likely need to expand its language processing ability so that it can handle a greater range of questions for the general internet population to accept it. This could happen if the site is bought out by a bigger player, or if they receive a big investment by a believer in the technology. It will also be interesting to see if Google attempts to build similar functionality into their browser. They could be the greatest obstacle or enabler of Wolfram Alpha’s future.
