Web 2.0 meets Crimson and Clover

Since attending SES Toronto (Search Engine Strategies) last week I've been interested in experimenting with some of the new web 2.0 applications that are both fun and create content and links beyond a website. This site - Emily Chang eHub - is a great place to find the latest in these applications. I went cruising around there today and found this creative picture/music application. Gave it a quick try with some of my Flickr photos (and some not on Flickr) and came up with what's below.

Click the speaker button to hear the sound.

SES Toronto Day 2

Couldn't attend all the sessions but got to a couple of good ones.

From the session on B2B, learned the following:

• 80% of buyers say they found their vendors - not the other way round - 45% say they found their vendors on-line
  
• Google - no surprise - is their dominant starting point
• vertical search engines like business.com are huge - with 70% of B2B buyers surveyed saying they go there for insight and info
• word of mouth - via the internet - and reputation management must be key marketing considerations for B2B vendors
• when buyers go looking on-line, the three biggest things they're looking for are products, pricing and features
• content on B2b websites must reflect the roles in the purchasers organization during the buying cycle

Interesting stuff. Almost every client I've worked for has had a reason for not wanting to put their pricing, or some form of 'starts at...' pricing on-line. Feedback from the conference is that this is a BIG mistake.

From the session on Web 2.0 and search engines, learned about new ways to add 'context' to web content - making it easier for the search engines to distinguish between Paris Hilton and the Paris Hilton.

Also heard the term SEO 2.0 for the first time. This makes sense to me. Search is evolving significantly as the web and 2.0 type applications like Flickr become main-stream. Learning how to integrate these into search marketing strategies will be fundamental - just as text, tagging and keywords are now.

SES Toronto Day 1

Took a break from reality yesterday - and today - to attend the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Toronto. Not a subject I've spent a lot of time on lately but it is something I have an interest in through my role at Longtail Publishing - a partnership I'm involved that owns about 150 domain names and websites - everything from torontoplumber.com through applestorelocations.com and museumhours.com - practical, local, directory-based listings.

SES isn't necessarily of greatest benefit to publishers, like Longtail. But it's of great interest to traditional brand marketers and company owners who want/need their brands in front of potential customers.

Get this - 80% of all first interactions with a brand occur on-line now. If you don't show up on-line, you don't show up.

Search engine marketing - getting ranked high enough for customers to find you on the key search engines - is a relatively new art/science that is evolving at the speed of the web. Two years ago, SES was all about getting ranked first page on Google. Everything was text based.

That's changing. Fast. Thanks to 'expert' sites like Flickr (photos), YouTube (videos) and hundreds/thousands of others (press releases, customer reviews, social sites like Facebook), getting your brand noticed and ranking highly on Google and other searches can start anywhere.

Some key, simple learning for me as I advise my clients on basic marketing - make a video, take some screen shots, do some press releases - and load them on the web. Tag them with the appropriate keywords and cover your bases to get noticed.

As a result, the key theme from Day 1 of SES was not 'search engine optimization' but 'digital asset management' - going beyond web-site based approaches and branching out to the other 'filters' on the net that get your brand ranked and noticed. Put another way - getting your content - text, pictures, videos, reviews - out beyond your website.

Other practical learning - how to appropriately 'tag' your content to match what potential customers are looking for - not 'shampoo', but 'shiny hair'; not 'lending', but 'borrowing'; not 'document destruction', but 'shredding'. Speaking simple, customer-centric language, not marketese.

For expert advice on doing this and marketing your company on the web I can highly recommend my partner in Longtail, John Robb. His site and contact info is here.

Overall a good day at SES Toronto. Looking forward to today.

That Work Thing

Hey. It's been a while. That work thing keeps getting in the way!

Since last blog I've been doing more traveling, some interesting client stuff and more photography.

On the travel side I've spent the last 4 weeks visiting US cities in the midwest and east coast. Not so pretty cities like Philadelphia and Baltimore.

One of the things I've looking for is visible signs of that recession I keep thinking is out there.

Those signs aren't obvious. All the flights are full. In every case except one, my first choice of hotels was fully booked. In Philadelphia and Baltimore, my first choice of rental car companies was sold out.

Some of the business owners I met with told me they think they might be seeing a premature summer slowdown, but nobody seems sure. So there I go - wrong again?

Also since my last post, my friend Martyn Bassett of Martyn Bassett and Associates sent along a few questions and published some of my not-so-brilliant thoughts in his monthly newsletter. One of Martyn's questions caught my attention because I've heard it a few times from managers in companies of different sizes.

Martyn Bassett Associates: Some might challenge this view and say it (good governance) clashes with and interferes with the entrepreneurial spirit. What are your thoughts?

Jim Crocker: I think that way more businesses have been killed by unskilled entrepreneurs than by good governance. Having your own business doesn’t make you an entrepreneur. Take all the help you can get.

One final thought, I'm continuing to do a lot of work with businesses that are partner-owned. The issues that these businesses face are fascinating, sometimes scary, often destructive. Getting and keeping two partners, never mind more on the same page, with the same vision and the same business approach is a monumental challenge. Having now consulted for a large number of these organizations, I plan to start exploring some of the issues and ideas/solutions I've seen for dealing with them in upcoming posts.

Innovation and Creativity - Follow-up

Judging by the traffic to the earlier Innovation Confusion post I'm not the only one confused...and there's lots of interest in innovation.

Those looking for more insight may want to check out the blog Creativity and Innovation. Their posts, innovation index and attendant insights are quite useful.

Healthcare and the Race for Free

Wired has an interesting article this month called 'Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business'. It describes how the internet in particular - thanks to essentially free distribution - has changed the thinking around some pricing and business models. A simple example of these pricing models changing - the demise of subscriptions and fees for on-line versions of newspapers (remember how some papers like the LA Times, New York Times and Wall Street Journal made their on-line versions inaccessible?).

(Note: I have to throw this in. While I'm not nearly as clever as Wired, I actually wrote a post on the race for free called 'Monetizing Data - The Race for Free back in December 2006'. $0.00 pricing IS an intriguing twist/opportunity on some business models.)

Reading the Wired article got me thinking. It's easy to see how advertising has supplanted pricing for some on-line services. But does the race for free, extend beyond the internet? Could it be extended?

I do a lot of work for a Canadian hospital. Hospitals in Canada mostly don't charge for their core services - there isn't a price list. Revenue/funding comes primarily from the government.

Over the past three years, management at this hospital has done their job reducing the fat from the organization. However, demand for their services continues to grow well in excess of their funding. In fact, funding doesn't even match inflation.

I got to wondering if Wired's theory might be applied to the hospital, eg, give hospital services away free to patients (what hospitals already do) and make up the revenue shortfall selling other products/services to other 'customers'.

Hospitals already charge their primary customers for some ancillary services (parking is a big one) but this isn't what I mean. In the free-services/other revenue model the hospital would be selling access to what it has - its customer base; large, skilled workforce, facilities and political clout - to anyone with a need for access to those things.

What about advertising? Advertising is a primary revenue source on the web - give stuff away for free, make revenue from advertisers. Who would advertise in a hospital? Seems to me anyone might want to although some products and services might be inappropriate.

This actually seems like an untapped opportunity for the hospital. It might not be huge - but the number of hospital visitors every year is large - I wonder what the revenue potential might be if every corner of the emergency department was covered in advertising, or the neo-natal unit was sponsored by J&J? What if every bed was like a NASCAR racer? Big logos and stickers all over them?

Who else might want access to what the hospital has? How about medical universities looking for a place to toss their students into hospital reality. What's that worth? The truth is, the hospital has a relationship with a teaching university - but the funding relationship is set by the government - at a rate well below the cost of putting up with learner doctor. It could work. It just doesn't.

Who else? The hospital customer base is probably a good testing environment for everything from new drugs to diapers. Maybe the hospital could renegotiate a bunch of it's supplier costs and turn them into testing revenues. I'm betting not - no question these companies already have their test facilities - but who knows - maybe there's a negotiation opportunity?

Politicians need access to what the hospitals offer. In fact, some of the best new funding comes at election time when politicians and parties want to sooth or cajole voters into their point of view. Maybe the Hospital could develop its political muscle more as a way of attracting even more funding. This is a certain opportunity.

I know I'm missing something here. With a little creativity there's got to be more opportunities. I'm interested in any thoughts from anyone on how else the hospital can give away its services and be rich like those internet companies. Ideas?

Innovation Confusion

Innovation has been coming up more in the strategy work I'm doing lately....as in, "this organization needs to be more innovative."

Unfortunately, the term innovation doesn't mean much to me.

Clearly it's important. I wouldn't be listening to my Ipod right now if Apple weren't a modern master at innovation.

Fortune's March 17 issue has a couple of articles on Apple. Apple's approach to innovation seems arrogant but effective - don't ask the consumer, just figure out what bugs us (Apple), eg, the cell phone, and build something better.

Compare that approach to Procter & Gamble, also covered in the same issue where 1) "we put the consumer at the center of everything we do", and 2) "we started thinking about innovation in new ways - we started from the premise that it's possible to run an innovation program in much the same way we run a factory".

So, the path is clear. There is no path.

Here are some thoughts for those as confused as I am about the innovation conversation:

> those with a strong desire to be more innovative probably need to clearly define why. What is the goal? The output? Is it a new product? A new process? A new way of managing that leads to more all round creativity?

> innovation is a strategy; is it a better strategy than some other way of achieving the same goal? For example, is innovation a better strategy than training everyone in the organization how to do their jobs better?

> if innovation is the right strategy, what is the plan? Who is in charge? What are the goals? Time frames? Process? Budgets?

For me, this is where the innovation conversation breaks down. In reality. I don't work for Apple or P&G. But the organizations I know, don't have an innovation plan. They haven't allocated budgets. No one is accountable for leading innovation.

Innovation will never happen in these organizations.

Right?

Wrong. I think.

Every organization I'm engaged with is developing either a new product or new approaches to doing whatever it is they do. They're growing and getting better at what they do.

Yes, some have significant challenges that require new and creative solutions. Maybe that requires a focus on innovation. Maybe.

What I am sure about is that all of them are making significant progress addressing what I would consider the basics of success in their business: better definition of corporate priorities and more focus on them; better, more capable managers who can mentor and lead teams; clearer measures and more effective processes for ensuring accountability.

As a result of progressing on these basics are these organization more innovative? Yeah, I think so.

Do they need to put more focus on innovation? No. At least that's not what I'm telling them.

More to come.