Marketbright, an on-demand emarketing solution with an integrated web content management platform, launched Brightsite, a new product that uses aspects of social networking to create a stronger bond between sales, marketing and the customer. Brightsite creates the equivalent of a B2B shopping cart for enterprise web sites. Brightsite provides a plug-and-play membership management tool for any enterprise website. Brightsite also provides the customer with a member account page with links to all events and offers they have accessed in the past, their account team, and other account-specific information, creating an easy-to-access history for new team members. Customer members also can invite their colleagues into a private, shared collaborative space. The new, interactive and personalized widgets can be easily introduced into existing web sites. Brightsite also allows greater cooperation between sales and marketing teams, allowing a customer’s microsite to become a branding tool with enhanced collaboration opportunities and fresh content. With Brightsite, the marketing team will be able to blast new content, but it will look customized for the sales person’s named accounts. Sales personnel will be able to review beforehand to ensure appropriateness of offers/content, to block the content, or to put a personalized note and pick and choose which items get forwarded on to their customers. http://www.marketbright.com
Category: Marketing & e-commerce (Page 39 of 75)
As we gear up for Gilbane Boston 2007, the number of possible topics to include in the tracks related to search seems boundless. The search business is in a transitional state but in spite of disarray is still pivotal in its impact on business and current culture. The sessions will reflect the diversity in the market.
One trend is quite clear; the amount of money and effort being expended for Web search or site search on commercial Web sites is a winner in the “search technology” revenues war with annual revenues measuring well into the $billions. On the other hand, a recent Gartner study described the 2006 revenues for enterprise search as below $400M. This figure comes from reading an excellent article, Enterprise Search: Seek and Maybe You’ll Find, by Ben DuPont in Intelligent Enterprise. Check it out.
The distinctions between search on the Web and search within the enterprise are numerous but here are two. First, Internet Web search revenue is all about marketing. Yes, we use it to discover, learn, find facts, and become more informed. But when companies supplying search technology to expose you to their content on the Internet they do so to facilitate commerce. If it falls into the hands of organizations that have other intent, libraries or government agencies, so be it.
As we all know, when we are at work, seeking to discover, learn or find facts to do our jobs better, we need a different kind of search. Thus, we seek a clear search winner built just for our enterprise with all of its idiosyncrasies. The problem is that what is inside does not look like the rest of the world’s content as it is aggregated for commercial views. Enterprises are unique and operate sometimes chaotically, or, at best, with nuanced views of what information is most important.
The second distinction relates to taxonomies, and the increase in their development and use. I’ve seen a dramatic increase in job postings for “taxonomists” and have managed several projects for enterprises over the years to build these controlled lists of terms for categorizing content. What is noteworthy about recent job opportunities is that most seem to be for customer facing Web sites. Historically, organizations with substantial internal content (e.g. research reports, patents, laboratory findings, business documents) hired professionals to categorize materials for a narrowly defined audience of specialists. The terminology was often highly unique, could number in the hundreds or thousands of terms, even for a relatively small enterprise. This is no longer a common practice.
Slow financial growth in enterprise search markets is no surprise. Like many tools designed and marketed for departments not directly tied to revenue generation, search goes begging for solid vertical markets. Search’s companion technologies are also struggling to find a lucrative toehold for use within the organization. Content management systems integrated with rich and efficient taxonomy building and maintenance functions are hard to find.
I am confident that tools in CMS products for building and maintaining complex taxonomies will not improve until enterprises find a solid business reason to put professional human resources into doing content management, taxonomy development, search, and text analytics on their most important knowledge assets. This is a tough business proposition compared to the revenues being driven on the Internet. What businesses need to keep in mind is that without the ability to leverage their internal knowledge content assets better, smarter and faster, there won’t be innovative products in the pipeline to generate commerce. Losing track of your valuable intellectual resources is not a good long term strategy. Once you begin committing to solid content resource management strategies, enterprise technology products will improve to meet your needs.
Thank you Andrew.
Andrew McAfee has a thoughtful post (“It’s Not Not About the Technology”) on a topic I’ve often bitten my tongue about, i.e., the (often smugly delivered) phrase “It’s not about the technology”. And of course the context is a discussion about applying technology to a business application, which should by definition, imply that both technology capabilities and business requirements need to be part of the “about”.
It is common for one or the other to be overly emphasized to ill effect. Perhaps because of my technical background, I am more sensitive to the use of this phrase in situations where the utterer is covering up for a lack of knowledge or fear of technology or change.
You simply can’t make good business decisions that involve technology without understanding what the technology can and can’t effectively do – business requirements need to be expanded or contracted based on what is possible and feasible if you want your IT investments to be successful and competitive.
Often the largest benefit of a piece of software is a little known (even to the vendor) feature that happens to allow for, e.g., a process improvement that would be a requirement if you knew it was possible. See what Andrew has to say.
Last week I began this entry, re-considered how to make the point and tucked it away. Today I unearthed an article I had not gotten around to putting into my database of interesting and useful citations. Lisa Nadile in The ABCs of Search Engine Marketing, in CIO Magazine, hits the nail on the head with this statement, “Each search engine has its own top-secret algorithm to analyze this data…” This is tongue in cheek so you need to read the whole article to get the humor. Ms. Nadile’s article is geared to Internet marketing but the comments about search engines are just a relevant for enterprise search.
I may be an enterprise search analyst but there are a lot of things I don’t know about the guts of current commercial search tools. Some things I could know if I am willing to spend months studying patents and expensive reports, while other things are protected as trade secrets. I will never know what is under the hood of most products. Thirty years ago I knew a lot about relatively simple concepts like b-tree indexes and hierarchical, relational, networked and associative data structures for products I used and developed.
My focus has shifted to results and usability. My client has to be able to find all the content in their content repository or crawled site. If not, it had better be easy to discover why, and simple to take corrective actions with the search engine’s administration tools, if that is where the problem lies. If the scope of the corpus of content to be searched is likely to grow to hundreds of thousands of documents, I also care about hardware resource requirements and performance (speed) and scalability. And, if you have read previous entries, you already know that I care a lot about service and business relationships with the vendor because that is crucial to long term success. No amount of “whiz bang” technology will overcome a lousy client/vendor relationship.
Finding out what is going on under the hood with some imponderable algorithms isn’t really going to do me or my client any good when evaluating search products. Either the search tool finds stuff the way my client wants to find it, or it doesn’t. “Black art,” trade secret or “patent protected” few of us would really understand the secret sauce anyway.
As consumer behavioral patterns across verticals (including retail, media and entertainment, and financial services) increasingly shift toward online channels, Web content must become increasingly monetizable. Factors which improve the monetizability of content relate primarily to rich user experiences, which require Web applications to combine behavioral analytics with the cross-platform, targeted delivery of digital media of all types (audio, video, streaming content, Flash, myriad image types), all available customer data, and content from Web services-based sources (maps, shipping information, weather reports, stock quotes, news). Not only must successful Web applications seamlessly wrap these components together behind the scenes, they must supply an interactive presentation layer that is aesthetically pleasing and easy-to-use. The primacy of the trend toward monetizable content will fuel other trends in the WCM space, among them, the heightened importance of:
- Design agencies as WCM solution providers. Vendors to watch: Blast Radius, Avenue A | Razorfish, Molecular.
- Analytics functionality within the WCM application to support multi-channel marketing campaigns. Vendors to watch: Interwoven, CrownPeak.
- The ability to incorporate rich media at the content creation stage. Vendors to watch: Adobe, ClearStory Systems, EMC/Documentum.
- Support for integrated search and advertising/merchandising. Vendors to watch: Endeca, FAST, Google.
- The emergence of WCM applications as primary brand managers. This is a channel strategy decision and is not vendor-oriented in nature.
BroadVision, Inc. (Pink Sheets:BVSN) announced a product roadmap for the next 12 months. The roadmap includes new products including an e-business framework with modular web services, agile development toolsets, a companion implementation methodology, a vertical application, an on-demand strategy, and the general availability of QuickSilver 3.0, the newest version of BroadVision’s e-publishing solution. BroadVision Kona Application Services is a library of modular web services including: e-Commerce solutions for transacting business online through B2B and B2C channels; Portal solutions; Content Management solutions to give business users control over the quality of information as they create, manage and publish content to e-business applications; and Process Management, a solution to develop and deploy user-centric self-service processes as well as task-centric workflow processes. Kukini is a new toolset incorporating XML, Web 2.0-based user experiences and packaged as an extension module to the Eclipse interactive development environment, Kukini leverages Kona’s core capabilities such as the BroadVision Process technology and yet is independent of the Kona engine. BroadVision Kukini is scheduled for general availability in the second quarter of 2007. BroadVision QuickSilver provides features for creation and publishing of lengthy, complex documents supporting multiple output formats (including HTML, PDF, and Postscript) and automatic publishing of personalized content to BroadVision Portal solutions. QuickSilver 3.0, available immediately, delivers a number of new features including Unicode support and improved support for XML authoring. http://www.broadvision.com
MarketLive, Inc. announced that it has teamed with Endeca to introduce new MarketLive Intelligent Site Search and Navigation. Designed for online retailers, MarketLive Intelligent Site Search and Navigation includes search, Guided Navigation and Dynamic Merchandising capabilities powered by Endeca and will be offered as a component of the MarketLive E-commerce Platform. MarketLive Intelligent Site Search will be generally available to new and existing MarketLive v5 customers in Q1 2007. http://www.endeca.com, http://www.marketlive.com
Linda Stone is talking about “continuous partial attention” a phrase she coined in 97 or 98. What is it? It is what I am doing right now, paying partial attention to Linda talking, partial to writing this blog entry, partial to those sitting around me rustling papers or not, I am also interspersing all this with thoughts of lunch, what session I will attend this afternoon, und so weiter …. We all do it.
It is not surprising. It is the way the brain has always worked (well at least for a while – remember all those cognitive science experiments in the 70s) – it is now just more explicit and we are getting better at it. Or at least some of us are; as much as I do it my daughter leaves me in the dust.
Apparently Linda has seen a backlash about the idea, but, as she said, “…continuous partial attention isn’t bad or good – it just is.”
Just as technologies are only tools that can be used for good or bad, our brain hardware can also be used for better or worse, to help or hinder. Our brain functions can be mis-used just like technology. As we get better with continuous partial attention, the result can be beneficial or rude. (e.g., easier to be rude and interrupt when you feel like it – it is not always OK) we have to learn the ethics as well as the efficiencies.
There are also some interesting challenges for product development. There are different tolerances for multi-processing, and these change even within one human unit, e.g., when you are tired vs. alert.
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