Brendan Callum of Perficient’s Salesforce.com practice introduces Salesforce Communities and how clients can gain business value by injecting mobile and social features securely into their business processes.

Communities go beyond portals by adding social collaboration, extensive branding, customization, and mobile access while retaining both enterprise security and tight integration with business processes.

Salesforce provides two general types of communities that can be used for a broad variety of purposes, from customer service to marketing or engagement of resellers, suppliers and partners.

Customer Communities deliver rich collaboration, mobile access and consistent branding for even the largest groups. For example, a service community enables customers to answer questions for other customers, quickly find the information they need, or work with service reps to resolve issues – decreasing time to resolution while increasing engagement and loyalty.

Partner Communities provide even greater ties to business process along with the added power of role-based security to segment the data that’s been shared with different members. For example, partner communities enable companies to manage reseller relationships by keeping some lead and funding information private, but enabling collaborative selling between partners, leading to more engaged partners and increased deal flow.

Key Communities features include:

• Business Process Integration: members can create and collaborate on support cases, sales opportunities or campaigns from within the community.
• Social Collaboration: members can interact, collaborate on goals and form groups to support their interests. 
• Branding/Customization: companies can design their community to match their brand and website look and feel. Content and navigation structure is highly customizable. 
• Mobility: members can access the community from any device, anywhere. 
• Social Intelligence: relevant content and resources are suggested to each member based on their interests and behavior. 
• Security & scalability: leveraging the trusted Salesforce platform, all data and member information is always safe — no matter how many members you have.

IBM has a intro explainer video on Digital Disruption, which succinctly explains the key ongoing processes of digital disruption and transformation, as we move from an “individual-centered economy” to an “everyone to everyone” economy.

The key disruptive technologies are of course:

• social media,
• mobility,
• analytics,
• cloud

“The smartest people on the planet working in the Oracle stack know that Kscope is the best conference to attend. Kscope offers great content from developers, administrators, architects, and business users.” That is how the Oracle Development Tools User Group describes their forthcoming conference.

Two of our own experts in Business Intelligence and OBIEE will be presenting at the conference. Kathryn Watson, discusses “When Facts and Dimensions Alone Aren’t the Answer: Logically Reversing the Star Schema”. Patrick Abram, discusses “Empower Mobile Restaurant Operations Analytics with Oracle Business Intelligence and Endeca”.

An overview is provided below:

In the emerging “Social Risk and Compliance” space, Actiance Socialite and Hearsay Social where rated leaders in a recent Forrester report. SRC solutions “help organizations enable companywide use of social media while providing the necessary controls and oversight to mitigate associated risks and enforce compliance.”

Hearsay Social primarily focuses on the financial and insurance industries. This brief video provides an overview.

Actiance Socialite is more of a general purpose tool, this video shows how they can help with social media governance.

I’m interested to know what you think about social medial governance and compliance solutions, and more generally how your organization is approaching social media as either a customer interaction channel or social business platform? How are your social interactions managed? Where does trust fit in?

McKinsey & Company says companies “must stop experimenting with digital and commit to transforming themselves into full digital businesses.” They offer insights into the seven habits that successful digital enterprises share. I’ll summarize them here:
 
 

1. Be unreasonably aspirational. Make someone accountable at the board level; create a stretch vision; measure digital value, not digital interactions.

2. Acquire new capabilities. Buy scarce talent en-mass; hire for digital skills, not industry experience; move into adjacent markets.

3. Ring-fence and cultivate talent. Protect digital talent from existing business operations, perhaps by locating them far away; don’t rely on existing HR models.

4. Challenge everything. Don’t accept historical norms; question the status quo; create a plan covering every function, product, business unit, and location.
5. Be quick and data driven. Continually evolve your value proposition; embrace live testing; create a data-based view of each customer.
6. Follow the money. Create a zero-based tech budget aligned with value at stake; invest across the value chain; scale success rapidly.
7. Be obsessed with the customer. Learn from every interaction; relentlessly evolve and improve the customer experience.

This is a great roadmap for any digital transformation initiative and although it does go beyond digital experience, or front-end technologies, it does not preclude them. What we are seeing with both user experience platforms and marketing automation technologies is deeper integration with both systems of record and systems of engagement, better and broader analytics, and a greater understanding of the customer through digital body language. These are enablers of a digital enterprise that should form part of a holistic enterprise strategy with board level sponsorship.
 

McKinsey & Company says companies “must stop experimenting with digital and commit to transforming themselves into full digital businesses.” They offer insights into the seven habits that successful digital enterprises share. I’ll summarize them here:

1. Be unreasonably aspirational. Make someone accountable at the board level; create a stretch vision; measure digital value, not digital interactions.

2. Acquire new capabilities. Buy scarce talent en-mass; hire for digital skills, not industry experience; move into adjacent markets.

3. Ring-fence and cultivate talent. Protect digital talent from existing business operations, perhaps by locating them far away; don’t rely on existing HR models.

4. Challenge everything. Don’t accept historical norms; question the status quo; create a plan covering every function, product, business unit, and location.
5. Be quick and data driven. Continually evolve your value proposition; embrace live testing; create a data-based view of each customer.
6. Follow the money. Create a zero-based tech budget aligned with value at stake; invest across the value chain; scale success rapidly.
7. Be obsessed with the customer. Learn from every interaction; relentlessly evolve and improve the customer experience.

This is a great roadmap for any digital transformation initiative and although it does go beyond digital experience, or front-end technologies, it does not preclude them. What we are seeing with both user experience platforms and marketing automation technologies is deeper integration with both systems of record and systems of engagement, better and broader analytics, and a greater understanding of the customer through digital body language. These are enablers of a digital enterprise that should form part of a holistic enterprise strategy with board level sponsorship.

Social and cloud technologies are connecting us to more people and information than we ever could have imagined. The challenge is to get the right information from the right sources in the right context at the right time. IBM’s cloud collaboration platform helps you collaborate with extended networks, focus on the relevant and filter out the rest.

There is a lot of excitement around this update, as from the video it appears as though people are placed at the center of collaboration.

Have a look at this video.

This week I’m at the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit 2014. The opening ceremony was fairly lackluster, and offers of back stages passes to the Bare Naked Ladies (a Canadian rock band) was met with lukewarm response from the audience of hard-nosed retailers, marketeers, and technology professionals. Jay Baer did a great job as Master of Ceremonies, and I’ll point out here that he also gave the titled keynote covering marketing technology. In real-life he runs a marketing advisory firm. The other highlight of the opening session was Kenichi Ebina, an overly dexterous performer, who had the audience pulling out smart-phones.

The key take-away for me was the announcement, by Robert Le Blanc, of IBM ExperienceOne,

So on the the Marketing and Merchandising Keynote,

Marketing is all about engagement, it does not come cheap or easy.

Jay said that to drive meaningful engagement you need utility (Youtilitiy), and what is Youtilitiy,

• It’s useful and interesting engagement
• People would pay for your content
• Customers would pay for the communication
• This is not communication that people simply tolerate
• The bar has been raised.
• Your message needs to be not just interesting but intriguing

Scrabble example:

Scrabble took vans carrying portable wifi stations around Paris to places where people wanted wifi access. To get access you challenge yourself to a game of “mini-scrabble”, and if you get the word correct, it becomes your wifi password. The more correct words, the longer you airtime.

TweetPee example:
Huggies Brazil was testing TweetPee last year, the advert features a baby peeing with a voiceover:

• nice and warm, but not crying
• mommy comes to the rescue
• baby has Tweet Pee (Huggues)
• tracks diaper stock
• no unnecessary changes
• save money / more toys for baby
• exists in Brazil

Go beyond authenticity, but be truly meaningful.

Water Billboard:

A university and an ad agency built the first-ever billboard to capture air humidity and turn it into potable drinking water in Lima, the second largest desert capital in the world. The University of Engineering and Technology of Peru and an ad agency called Mayo DraftFCBand created the structure for the residents who are forced to draw polluted water from wells.

Peru gets less than two inches of rain a year and has an atmospheric humidity of about 98 percent. The billboard system uses reverse osmosis, a water purifying process, and then stores the water in tanks that hold 20 liters each. The water is dispensed at the bottom of the structure, which has provided 9,450 liters in three months, according to the school. This is enough to provide water to 1000’s of families each month.

Next up was Kevin Bishop – IBM VP of EMM. He was exciting about how visceral marketing can be, and reminded us of the need for systems to help transmit and capture “Moments that Matter”.

• IBM does qualitative and quantitate research
• The nature of marketing is changing, in 2014 it is about knowing each customer in context, whereas in 2012 it was about understanding each customer as an individual. Marketing has always been about knowing the customer – it’s the degree that is changing.

Previously many companies would place their product or service at the center of everything they do, now marketing is about placing the customer at the center.

• merchandising :: right product – right time – right place – right price.
• who are the most important customs and what are the most important moments
• Understand -> Engage -> Optimize
• Marketing -> Merchandising -> Sales -> Customer Service

(See IBM circle chart)

Continuous customer engagement is challenging, but rewarding
Limited insight of customer behavior across touch points
Siloed systems and processes
There is a significant lack of skills in quantitate and analytical skills in marketing.

There is a shortage of data scientists, particularly those that are able to talk to marketing directors.

After marketeers have all this new data, and the right tools to act on it, they will want to push out messages to their audience. There is a fine line to balance and get this right:

• relevance vs context vs creepiness

Messaging needs to be relevant, and in the right context, but should not come across as creepy. An example of missing this would be an airline that offers an upgrade on a flight that has just been cancelled.

There was a panel discussion and some highlights include:

• “multi-channel attribution is voodoo – you can’t get the emotional engagement” – Boots
• “attributions is more art than science”
• “we still have paper in the marketing mix, but it’s used in conjunction with other channels.”
• “word of month is number one assess – leveraging passion of fans”

Afterwards we where reminded of IBM ExperienceOne and that it’s an integration of

• Unica
• Tealeaf
• Silverpor
• CoreMetrics
• Xtify

IBM helps you attract, delight and measure the lifetime value of customers

—
IBM has proven solution patterns for business outcomes

• Ignite and Grow Customer Relationships
• Understand Your Customers
• Curate Meaningful Customer Interactions
• Convert Digital PRospects To Loyal Customers
• Deliver Empowering Digital Experiences
• Serve And Delight

Chris Wong, IBM VP

• Customer is interested in what is relevant / meaningful to them
• meaningful engagement
• customs express themselves in data
• data analytics
• digital engagement – silverpop (cloud based marketing automation), customer journey mapping

Bill Nussey – CEO Silverpop

• started with email
• moved to behavioral marketing
• content management
• 100% cloud-based behavioral marketing

—
Customer experience needs to have a single intentional design

• make customer engagement real and easier
• essential to your business
• dynamic and agile
• built around the way you work

systems of engagement are essential to your enterprise = these need to work all the time, and need to innovate, dynamic and continuous change

• available all the time
• agile
• the systems needs to work around the way you work

systems of record = HR, CRM, Finance etc
How to collaborate with IBM ExpereinceOne

• collaboration is critical
• omni-channel customer designer – customer journey across channels

—
Kareem Yusuf
IBM VP of SaaS Operations

IBM ExperienceOne (innovation priorities)

• User Workflow and Experience
  • Visualizations and tool sets which create collaborative experiences that integrate processes across organizations
  • delivering new interactions modes so marketeers can get insights faster
  • which steps readily lend themselves to mobile – such as approvals
  • understanding the customer (data)
• Contextual View of the Customer
  • synthesize contextual views of customer behavior and activities as they flow across channels
  • identity management – how do we know what different interactions are from the same customer
  • data format – digita data exchange with W3C
• Customer Journey Map
  • cross channel
• Realtime Personalization
  • richer intelligence to deliver relevant, personalized interactions across channels
  • understanding the events in context of all other relevant events
  • browsing for a loan, also has an existing account, new job, life changes
  • personalized pricing
  • delivered out to the engagement point at the right time
• Mobile
  • deepen behavioral insights and harness device innovations to enable seamless engagement
  • native mobile replay – in browser as the customer experiences it
  • near field engagement technologies (like iBeacon)

IBM Design Thinking

Moving towards User-Centric development from Feature centric development

At IBM Smarter Commerce in Tampa, Florida, IBM VP Robert LeBlanc announced ExperienceOne, a a portfolio of cloud-based and on premise solutions to help users make moments matter by combining marketing, sales and services capabilities.

Essentially this offering combines:

• WebSphere Commerce
• IBM Enterprise Marketing Management
• IBM Customer Experience Suite (part of the IBM Digital Experience offering)

IBM also announced an academic initiative to bring commerce skills to the classroom so students can acquire the skills they need for the digital commerce workforce.

As part of today’s news, IBM added new and enhanced software capabilities that support three of the new engagement solution sets:

• Understand Your Customers: At the heart of this solution set is IBM’s newly integrated Digital, Behavioral, Social Media and Predictive Customer analytics offering to help clients identify real-time trends based on internal and external customer data. It features new mobile analytics that can replay individual user sessions on both Android and iOS device apps, enabling marketers and commerce professionals to pinpoint the exact moment when a customer decided to browse, buy or abandon a transaction. (Edit: This is based on IBM Tealeaf technology)
• Maximize Sales, Profit and Loyalty: This solution set helps clients quickly act on insights and maximize customer value using IBM’s enhanced omni-channel merchandising capabilities. It enables merchandising professionals to automate price optimization, maintain real-time transparency and competitive pricing across all physical and digital channels to deliver the right offer to the right customer at the right time.
• Deliver Empowering Digital Experiences: As the gateway to each customer touch point, this solution set is supported by enhancements to IBM’s customer digital experience software. Marketing, sales and service professionals now can more easily leverage dynamic customer, pricing and performance analytics by embedding real-time offers into their mobile, social and rich media experiences. The real-time offer engine automates personalization across the customer experience at scale, increasing engagement, satisfaction and sales. (Edit: IBM Customer Experience Suite)

IBM also introduced three new cloud business solutions to give clients more flexibility in how they buy and deploy IBM ExperienceOne. These solutions combine consulting services, IBM ExperienceOne software and cloud infrastructure powered by SoftLayer, an IBM company. They include:

• Customer Data as a Service: Enables clients to combine disparate customer data from internal and external sources to improve marketing performance and revenue growth.
• Customer Analytics as a Service: Helps organizations quickly identify new customer trends, anticipate future behavior and suggest next best actions to deepen engagement.
• Digital Commerce as a Service: Allows business leaders to deliver exceptional digital experiences and accelerate time to market for a range of customer engagement solutions from order capture through fulfillment.

Earlier this week, Gartner hosted a debate to determine whether structure or search are more important to organizations data needs. Some insights I wanted to share with you from this debate are:

Gavin Tay from Singapore – Structure
Hans Galler Kuller from Germany – Search

End-users want the Google search experience inside their organizations.

Search is about having the first result being the most relevant based on context (personalization).

Enterprise Search Magic Quadrant

• 18 vendors
• and their market position
• search technologies
• key word
• structure, meta-data & taxonomy
• send you stuff based on past experience when you need it
• HAL and Knight Rider
• are there classification tools that can help categorize content / data
• ontology tools

Search challenge: finding the right stuff and relevancy = information over load

Challenge of structure: maintaining structure and the changing nature of content

combining structured data with unstructured data
to get a more complete picture

The debate ensured with more weight given to search, however it was noted that structure may be as important when considering taxonomy and ontology, as well as data retention policies.

Ultimately an organization needs to have both. My view is inline with this, and when you look at portal platforms, a common theme is how is this site laid out, how will end-users find the information or tools they need (i.e. can it be found in two or three clicks)? This applied particularly for commonly accessed information and tools. However search is also required to find adhoc information and tools, but may be used for daily processes to. It can depend on the unique nature of the work, or the individual concerned.

Mark Hurd recently announced a vision and strategy for the Oracle Marketing Cloud. This cloud service platform is built off recent acquisitions: BlueKai, Compendium, Eloqua and Responsys. The promise is to deliver enterprise-capabilities marketers need to “unify customer data, engage the right audiences, and deliver the high-performing marketing programs.”

Essentially the Oracle Marketing Cloud is an amalgamation of Oracle’s marketing automation technologies, namely:

• BlueKai,
  • big data for marketing
• Compendium,
  • a cloud-based content marketing provider that helps companies plan, produce and deliver engaging content across multiple channels throughout their customers’ lifecycle.
• Eloqua,
  • cloud-based marketing automation and revenue performance management
  • the core of Oracle’s Marketing Cloud
• and Responsys
  • manage their digital relationships and deliver the right marketing to their customers across email, mobile, social, display and the web. – See more at: http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/responsys#sthash.9wud4SHF.dpuf

and combining them with Oracle’s Social Cloud. Oracle Social Cloud is a cloud service that helps you manage and scale your relationship with customers on social media channels.